The Passing Of Traditional Society

THE PASSING

OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

Modernizing The Middle East

By DANIEL LERNER

JK

with the assistance of LUCILLE W. PEVSNER
and an introduction by DAVID RIESMAN

THE FREE PRESS, New York

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collier-macmillan- limited, London

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UNIVERSITY OF JODHPUR LIBRARY!
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Copyright 1958 by The Free Press, a Corporation

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permis-
sion in writing from the Publisher.

Collier-Macmillan Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Ontario
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-6487

FIRST FREE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION 1964

Fourth Printing August 1968

For My Mother

LOUETTA LERNEH

Who Passed From Traditional Ways
To A Modern Style
With Dignity And Grace

This book is sponsored jointly by

The Center for International Studies , Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

AND

The Bureau of Applied Social Research , Columbia University.

The field studies were conducted by the Columbia Bureau, which produced
the following country reports:

Turkey— Daniel Lemer, George K. Schueller, Mary Stycos
eebanon-syria — William N. McPhee, Rolf B. Meyersohn
Egypt— Patricia L. Kendall, Benjamin B. Ringer
Jordan— Joseph M. Stycos
jran— Benjamin B. Ringer, David L. Sills

The book was prepared, with assistance from
Paul L. Berkman of the Columbia Bureau,
under the auspices of the M.I.T. Center.

Preface

A DECADE of effort went into the studies from which this book
was made. Another half-decade has passed since the book appeared. These
fifteen years have witnessed the passing of traditional society from every
continent. No area of the world has resisted the attractions, despite the
increasingly evident risks, of modernization. The emerging nations have
hastened to become new' states and emulate the ways of modern societies.

Haste has made waste; risks have turned into losses. The "want: get
ratio” has been upset— since people have learned to want for more than
they can get. As a result, the “revolution of rising expectations” we cele-
brated so confidently fifteen years ago has, in many places, become a
"revolution of rising frustrations.” Modernization, it now appears, is harder
than one supposed. Why is this so? Two difficulties are paramount

One is a "technical” difficult)'— or can be made to seem so. This is the
problem of raising income fast and high enough so that poor people, while
raising their own consumption to acceptable levels, will still have something
left over to save. These savings— so runs the technical argument— will then
go into investment that raises production levels, which in turn will again
raise both consumption and saving levels. In this way there will be gener-
ated a self-sustaining cycle of grow'th to replace the vicious circle of
poverty in which most traditional societies still live.

Tire trouble with this cogent technical solution is people. They don’t
do what, on any rational course of behavior, they should do. They want
more consumption, but they don’t worry about saving and think little about
productive investment. Instead of limiting their families, so that each
member can have a larger share to consume, they produce a population
explosion. As a result every gain in real income is promptly swallowed up
by the extra mouths to feed. This sort of behavior has led economists to
focus their recent studies on “non-economic factors” and development
planners to broaden their attention from technical assistance (as in Point
IV) to "human resources" (as in AID). We now recognize that modemiza-

(vii)

( viii ) Preface

tion can succeed only in the measure that it meets its second paramount
difficulty— its “people problems.”

This book’s focus on modernization as people-problems thus is just
as valid now, and even more timely than it was six years ago. Were I
rewriting the book now, I would make changes to take account of events.
I would sound less unqualifiedly optimistic about the republican stability
of Turkey, for example, since the two recent military coups impose qualifi-
cation. But the dogged insistence of the new regime on maintaining
constitutional forms and improving democratic procedures reinforces the
underlying confidence that Turkey remains our best hope for republican
stability in the Middle East. I would be less concerned now by Nassers
use of external adventures to avoid the harder people-problems of internal
participation; instead I would congratulate him on having followed our
advice. But these changes concern the transitory flow of the daily news—
and this book explicitly disclaimed the function of a current events reader.

The central perspective has been validated by events of the past six
years. Few today will quarrel with the view of modernity as a “behavioral
system” or with the proposition that modernization requires a systemic
“transformation of lifeways” if growth is to be made self-sustaining. Nor do
the specific relations posited for the systemic transformation seem con-
trived today, as they did to some readers six years ago.

Even the charge of "ethnocentrism” that was heard a few years back—
when the “Ugly American” was in vogue— has been seen through as a
superficial slogan. The people-problems of modernization do include an
“ethnocentric predicament.” But in this predicament the ethnocentricity
of Americans aiding development programs abroad is only the minor term;
the major term is the ethnocentricity of the developing peoples themselves.
The last few years have shown us the cruelty of Indonesians in dealing with
their own Eurasians, the hostility of most South Asians to their “Overseas
Chinese,” the depredations by East Africans against Indians, the merciless
conflicts between Greeks and Turks, the ethnocentric “Egyptianization”
that terrorized and penalized all minorities including the oldest Egyptian
stock— the Christian Copts.

The ethnocentric predicament is confounded by failure to realize
that modernization appears as Westernization by historical coincidence.
Modernity is primarily a state of mind— expectation of progress, propensity
to growth, readiness to adapt oneself to change. The nations of the North
Atlantic area first developed the social processes— secularization, urbaniza-
tion, industrialization, popular participation— by which this state of mind
came to prevail. The “Western Model” is only historically Western;
sociologically it is global. The recent history of the U.S.S.R. and Japan
shows how effectively these processes can modernize societies that are geo-
graphically remote from the West. The data in this book (see “The System

Preface ( ix )

of Modernity” in Chapter II) show that the same basic model reappears
in virtually all modernizing societies on all continents of the world, regard-
less of variations in race, color, or creed.

The Western model must, in this sense, be freed from the constraints
of ethnocentrism in order to function effectively. It is just here that the
ethnocentric predicament of the Middle East, as of other developing areas,
presents a formidable obstacle to modernization. The book formulated this
point, six years ago, as follows (p. 47):

From the West came the stimuli which undermined traditional
society in the Middle East; for reconstruction of a modem society that
will operate efficiently in the world today, the West is still a useful
model. What the West is, in this sense, the Middle East seeks to become.
But these societies-in-a-hurry have little patience with the historical
process of Western development; what happened in the West over
centuries, some Middle Easterners now seek to accomplish in years.

Moreover, they want to do it their "own way.” A complication of
Middle East modernization is its own ethnocentrism— expressed politi-
cally in extreme nationalism, psychologically in passionate xenophobia.
The hatred sown by anticolonialism is harvested in the rejection of
every appearance of foreign tutelage. Wanted are modem institutions
but not modem ideologies, modem power but not modem purposes,
modem wealth but not modern wisdom, modem commodities but not
modern cant. It is not clear, however, that modern ways and words
can be so easily and so totally sundered. Underlying the varying ide-
ological forms which modernization took in Europe, America, Russia
land Japan], there have been certain behavioral and institutional com-
pulsions common to all.

That the theoretical model presented in this book has been validated
by the flow of events since its publication is gratifying to me as a social
commentator on our world. It is equally gratifying to me, as a social scientist,
that the empirical structure of the model has been validated by other re-
searchers working in virtually every area of the globe. These Middle
Eastern studies have been replicated three times in Turkey and Iran, twice
in Pakistan, and at least once in the Philippines, Thailand, India, Abyssinia,
Nigeria, Brazil, Venezuela -and other places from which I have had brief
reports without data. These replications have been performed, in good
scientific fashion, without my knowledge and usually by persons previously
unknown to me. The results I have seen, while often suggesting modifica-
tions and improvements in research design, consistently validate the
systemic relationships postulated in the model.

It is unusual for an empirical social science model to survive this many

( x ) Preface

years and this many replications. The best service a model can render,
however, is to hasten its own obsolescence by leading to a better one. I look
forward to this outcome in due course.

Daniel Lemer

East- West Center
Honolulu, Hawaii
August 1964

Contents

PREFACE Vii

INTRODUCTION by David Riesman 1

Perspectives

I. THE GROCER AND THE CHIEF: A PARABLE 19

1. Balgat Perceived: 1950

2. Balgat Revisited: 1954

3. The Passing of Balgat

II. MODERNIZING STYLES OF LIFE: A THEORY 43

1. The Mobile Personality: Empathy

2. The Mobility Multiplier: Mass Media

3. The "System” of Modernity

4. The Hurdles of Modernization

5. The Model of Transition

III. THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY:

A SURVEY 76

1. The Story of This Book

2. Ranking the Nations: Societal Audits

3. Persons and Places: Deviant Phases
and Divergent Styles

4. The Cases in Hand

(*i)

Contents

(xii)

The New Turks

IV. TURKEY: FROM THE PAST 111

1. The Ottoman Context

2. The Atatiirk Vectors: Ways of Participation

3. The Communication Revolution

4. Toward New Turks

5. Traditionals: The Constrictive Self

V. TURKEY: TOWARD THE FUTURE 136

1. From Tradition to Transition

2. Constriction and Communication

3. Modems: The Big Picture

4. Transitionals: The Widening World

The Arab Worlds

VI. LEBANON: TWO WORLDS

IN SMALL COMPASS 169

1. The Westernizing Factors

2. Media and Status

3. New Opinion Leaders in Rural Lebanon

4. Women and the Media

5. Problems of Modem Governance

VII. EGYPT: THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 214

1. The Vicious Circle of Poverty

2. The Revolutionary Symbolisms:
nation and CLASS

3. The Media and the Revolutions

4. Politics and Psyche in The Vicious Circle

5. Whither the Communication Revolution?

6. Which Way Is Forward?

Contents ( xiii )

VIII. SYRIA: THE LURES OF EXTREMISM 264

1. The Social Setting of Political Instability

2. The Young Effendis: From Personal
Frustration to Political Extremism

3. A Typology of Political Attitudes

4. The Politics of Insecurity

IX. JORDAN: ONE STATE WITH TWO PEOPLES 303

1. "Culture Contact”: The Setting
of Social Change

2. The Constrictive World of the Beduin

3. The Village Farmers

4. The Town Enterprisers

5. The Cosmopolitan Elite

On the Margins

X. IRAN: IN A BIPOLAR WORLD 353

1. Iran between the Powers

2. The Struggle at Home

3. The Structure of Iranian Extremism

4. Bipolarity and International Communication

5. The Meaning of Mossadegh

6. Epilogue: The Future of Media and Mass

XI. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 398

Appendices

A. THE QUESTIONNAIRE 415

B. REPLICATION OF THE EMPATHY INDEX 434

C. THE LATENT STRUCTURE ANALYSIS 438

NOTES 447

INDEX

461

Introduction"

By DAVID RIESMAN

SOME YEARS AGO Professor Lemer gave me the oppor-
tunity to read a number of translated interviews that had been
done in Turkey and Lebanon. I studied them and, later, some of
the interviews done in other countries of the Middle East, less to
develop my very limited knowledge of the area, than out of my
interest in the technique of the interview as a cultural form, as a
mode of communication among the social strata as well as a
mode of inquiry. I had long wondered how interviewing was even
possible in Muslim cultures where relations between strangers of
opposite sex were supposed to be jealously guarded and where, as
in other traditional societies, an anthropologist might come and
live in a community and gradually establish a role for himself, but
hardly a passing interviewer whose motives could scarcely be
grasped.

Indeed, there were barriers. It proved impossible to get the
survey under way in Iraq. In uneasy Syria, the interviewer was
sometimes taken for a spy; as one wrote:

I heard that after I had finished this interview rumors started to go
around that I belong to the F.B.I. looking for Communists. Others said
I want to take their sons to Korea. . . . Although I had explained the
matter and purpose of the interview yet people were very skeptical about
it. And any time the name of any big power or the name of their gov-
ernment used to be mentioned, you feel that they are not at ease and
give short dry answers, this is the attitude I met with most of the non-
educated class . 1

Moreover, as Professor Lemer explains, those more accessible to
interviewing were consciously oversampled— men as against women;
town and city dwellers as against fanners and nomads; readers and

( 1 )

( 2 ) Introduction

radio listeners as against non-readers and non-listeners. For the
effort of the studies was to sense the drift of opinion and feeling
among those who counted or might possibly count politically.
Nevertheless, the political orbit was drawn much wider than hier-
archically-minded people concerned only with those now holding
power would think made sense: many illiterates, peasants, and
poor workers and unemployed were drawn into the net of the
interviewing.

However, from the data in hand, we cannot know what all the
obstacles were to getting the inarticulate to respond— the underdogs
who, even in our own opinion-prone country, tell the interviewer
that they have no views, that their feelings could not possibly
interest any higher-ups, and won’t he please go down the road
and find someone else. Nevertheless, every so often in the chapters
that follow one gets a glimpse of the interviewer at work (notably
so in the town of Balgat at the outset). And one of the interviewers
in Syria reports, in response to the final question which asked what
the respondent thought of such interviews as this, that the latter
blurted out:

Why should you go to the Universities and study, while my children
start working at ten years of age?

To be sure, such an “uncalled for” retort, with its class-conscious
comparison, is very rare in the materials I read, and we learn
from the rest of the interview that this man, a carpetweaver, is
pro-Soviet— one of the tiny minority of workers deeply touched
by proletarian rather than primarily nationalistic ideology.

Interviewers, in fact, bear to the bureaucracy of social research
somewhat the same relation that foremen bear to industrial man-
agement: the interviewers mediate between the home office and
the field, adjusting to the capabilities of particular respondents
the demands for comparability and standardization that issue from
central headquarters. Gaps of education and empathy, even within
our own country, are sufficiently wide to make the "same” questions
mean different things to different sorts of respondents. And any
question is seldom, in die tone of the interviewer, the same question
orally as it appears in print, despite the survey director’s strenuous
use of a kind of “Basic American” which will neither patronize the
rich nor intimidate the poor. Correspondingly, the interviews on
which Mr. Lemer relies were inevitably “translated” by those who

Introduction ( 3 )

did them and who managed with differential effectiveness to blend
distant queries with parochial understandings.

While the interviewers thought that they got better interviews
from the more articulate, I found those interchanges at least as
illuminating which went more awkwardly, as where the respondent
stood on his privacy, or lacked that ready conversational coin of
opinions wliich the process of die interview presupposes. In the
Western countries where private opinion has become public, and
vice versa, one finds only a tiny minority of “don’t knows” among
the overwhelming majority of “do knows,” and littie attention has
been paid to diis perhaps vanishing small group. But in the pre-
industrial and pre-democratic lands, die “don’t knows” still loom
large. A characteristic answer is tiiat of the Turkish peasant who,
responding to the question as to what he would do if he were
President, declared:

My God! How can you ask such a thing? How can I ... I cannot . . .
president of Turkey . . . master of the whole world?

Correspondingly, many of the tradition-minded in these interviews,
asked where they would like to live if they could not live in their
native villages, said diey would rather die; tiiey could not conceive
of living anywhere else, any more than of being somebody else.

Yet it should be noted that the concept “Turkey” was not
strange to die man quoted above, and the concept “Egypt” was
familiar even to die most depressed fcllahin — tiiough not all die
nations of die Middle East have percolated dieir often newly
established collective identity down to the remote villages. (The
concept “Middle East,” as Mr. Lemer points out, is alien both to
die surviving parochial identities and to the nascent pan-Arab,
pan-Islamic, and other more inclusive and mutually competing
identities.) In this perspective, the interviews themselves give as
well as get information: they are an aspect of secularization ac-
companying the mass media now beamed at the area, and inform-
ing people that they are Turks, Syrians, Arabs, and that other people
are other tiiings-thus replacing tribalism and isolation by national-
ism, and folk proverbs by widely-distributed slogans and opinions.

The most dramatic material in this volume, in this perspective,
concerns die speed with which traditional society is breaking
down, prior to the coming of commerce, industrialism, or literacy.

( 4 ) Introduction

As we know from many reports, this is happening everywhere,
so much so that a young generation of anthropologists is growing
up who cannot find tribes uninfluenced by Western contact. Even
so, it is hard to realize the rapidity of change in the rate of change.
Joyce Cary’s wonderful novel, Mr, Johnson, may serve as an illus-
tration. It describes a young West African clerk, educated in a
mission, who is on the edge of literacy, and who has a vivid roseate
picture, gained from consular officials, of ‘home,” that is, Great
Britain. The pathos of his situation is that, with his Bush wife and
semi-acculturated fellow-clerks, he cannot move rapidly enough
to take possession of the new estate of British gentleman held out
to him; in the fashion of the arriviste, he overreaches himself
dramatically, and crashes. Cary is extraordinarily sensitive to the
pace as well as the pathos of African modernization; yet, reading
his book published in 1939, one would never suppose that the
successors to the Mr. Johnsons would bring forth an independent
and politically alert and, in many strata, literate Ghana less than
a generation later.

The pace of change has been immensely accelerated by the
coming of mass media-radio and movies— which do not require the
arduous steps of literacy; and, as we know from advertisers’ ex-
perience within the United States, these media have come on the
world stage along with many mass-produced consumer goods which
have altered the imagery of ambition out of all keeping with tradi-
tional limits. While peasants could always wish for more livestock
and land (as in Tolstoy’s legend "How Much Land Does a Man
Need?”), and a bigger house, and while people can slowly learn
to want more money as an end in itself, the new consumer "durables”
of the last few decades— such as radios, refrigerators, bicycles, even
cars-have greatly reduced the traditional wantlessness of the
impoverished, and have brought women as well as men into the
orbit of desire. 2

With wants come new opinions; with new opinions, new
.political awareness. Professor Lemer relates these trends by means
of his concept of the "participant style” which has come about in
the West with near-universal literacy, with industrialization and
some degree of urbanization, and with free elections. But what
happens when peoples skip steps (as, of course, the age-old pro-
cesses of borrowing and diffusion always facilitate in some measure),
moving from preliteracy or illiteracy to the post-literate stage of

Introduction (5)

the mass media, without the individuation, commercial and man-
agerial skills, and occasional cultivation that accompany print? Mr.
Lemers book is also a story of pseudo-participants: of mobs on
the streets of Cairo or Tehran who have been brought into the
political process, though they lack the skills needed to make their
new slogans come more nearly true. While analogous mobs were
not wholly unknown to Imperial Rome or 19th Century Paris and
New York, the continuous turmoil that the new media can en-
courage, and the new consumer goods entice, would seem to be
new.

The mobs would not be there in such number, ejected from the
land and without work or home in the city, were it not for the
explosion of population brought about by modem sanitary measures.
The hope of overcoming the Malthusian impasse in the countries
of high population density and potential rests on achieving in-
dustrialization with such speed that the values of the low-birth-rate
family would quickly spread, and thus prevent each increase in
productivity from being eaten up by the growing excess of births,
as in India and Egypt, where, as generally in the underdeveloped
areas, deatlis have dropped so much more quickly than births
that all efForts at per capita economic progress are repeatedly set
back.

Something of the same cancerous disproportion, it seems to
me, has occurred with the spread of the newer media. People now
are brought into the participant style who would earlier have lacked
the chance to develop what Mr. Lemer calls the "mobile sensibility” :
the empathic readiness to try on a new way of life. Whereas once
a few energetic spirits would have left an Anatolian or Lebanese
village and come to Brazil or New York, today, as it were, Brazil
and New York, Hollywood and the BBC, the Voice of the Arabs
and many other impalpable voices, too, come to the village. 8 Not
everyone listens, to be sure; and some of Mr. Lemers most arresting
work has gone into study of the differences in personality between
the "Transitionals” who expose themselves to the media and those
of like income, illiteracy, and physical setting who do not. But
there are enough of these Transitionals, nomads of the spirit in
search of a new identity, to prefigure the end of traditional society.
As births have outrun deaths, so have opinions outrun opportunities.

The two problems are, of course, related. Malthus thought
population run riot would be checked by famine, pestilence, and

( 0 ) Introduction

war. What about opinions run riot? Mr. Lemer shows how, after
the Aswan Dam defeat, Nasser became in some measure die captive
of his outi movement and its polemics: in the face of the immense
technical and psychological obstacles to industrial development
and its cultural concommitants, the mobile sensibility of the Trans-
itionals tended to push him toward profitless adventurism. It is
depressing to read the Egyptian interviews where, one after another,
even the very highly educated respondents say, when asked what
can be done about the poverty they agree is terrible, that driving
out the British (this was 1950) or destroying Israel will do it. To
be sure, Israel’s own nationalism and expansionism may somewhat
increase the cost of Egypt’s defense, and driving out the British
may increase Egypt’s elan and sense of self-chosen destiny. But,
to the outsider, the gulf between Egyptian aspirations and realistic
plans (and die same is true, pari passu, elsewhere) appears much
greater than that of European nations in their formative stages—
for the latter, of course, did not have their aspirations set by the
present Western model of military strength and economic pros-
perity. Paradoxically, in one sense the nascent opinions do not
run riot enough: slogans proliferate and swirl around a few na-
tionalistic themes, but the interviews (possibly hampered in this
respect by their form and level of approach) are not marked by
great heterogeneity of outlook within socioeconomic categories.

In any event, the kind of sloganized xenophobia and suspicious-
ness which turns up in many interviews with well-educated mem-
bers of the middle classes (of course, in other interviews one
discovers more cosmopolitan types, secular in spirit and moderate
in temper) is the kind one is apt to find in the United States
among the least educated, that is, people who are participant
enough to have and voice opinions, but not middle-class or well-
educated enough to be moderate, soft-spoken, and more or less
tolerant and trustful. The pre-literate, to the extent they still exist
in the Middle East, cannot be called nationalistic or bigoted; they
are simply voiceless, or speak with the voice of tradition. But the
illiterate and the post-literate have absorbed the shorthand aims
of the mobile literate leaders— men who, as in Pakistan, can produce
explosive awakenings of nationalism (in Pakistan, with a million
dead and sixteen million made homeless, the end is not yet).
Certainly, inventions worked out in the West, such as federalism
and judicial protection of minority rights (which offer bulkheads

Introduction ( 7 )

a gain st bigotry in America), seem of scant possibility when ethnic
blocs and religious sects, newly armed with slogans and the power
to harm, struggle at once to establish an identity and to mark its
boundaries. Thus, while we can prefigure the end of tradition, it is
hard to envisage the beginning of enlightenment.

Yet perhaps such misgivings (which I harbor also concerning
the future of the West in the age of the atom), and the use of
such terms as "enlightenment” (which of course itself easily be-
comes a “tradition”), may only mark the limits of my imagination.
It is conceivable that the birth-rate may drop in the countries of
the Middle East without extensive industrialization and urbaniza-
tion, even though I cannot foresee politically feasible steps in such
a development. For it is not only Westerners who find it hard
not to assume that the non-Westem nations must either fail or
follow one of the courses already marked out by the West: as I
have already indicated, the nations of the Middle East, hungry
for jets and steel plants, are possessed by the same blueprints,
either in their Victorian or Soviet forms. The new trajectories re-
quired, in densely populated countries, to break through the vicious
circles of poverty and polemic, scarcely exist, and the adumbrations
provided by Point IV and the Marshall Plan no longer command
the support of Southern congressmen, fearful of the competition
of Egyptian cotton and moving toward an isolationism akin to that
of the small towns of the Midwest. The imperative hope that India
might provide another alternative, with American aid on the
County Agent model, seems slim as these lines are written.

Mr. Lemer adopts, in dealing with these matters, a contrast
coined by Macaulay in considering Italian attitudes toward Machi-
avelli: the contrast of "courage cultures” and “ingenuity cultures.”
The Arabs in recent centuries appear to have emphasized the
former (even while occasionally practicing the latter), and today
much intellectual activity in Egypt and elsewhere goes into ex-
planations of how modernity can be achieved without violating
Islamic tradition— or how, on the contrary, it cannot. My own im-
pression is that the ingenuity needed to escape the all-too-evident
impasses in the Middle East can neither be imported nor be locally
engendered without a lessening of the dominant male values, what
the Spanish term “machismo:’ A greater equality between the sexes
would seem to be requisite before many of the approaches toward

( 8 ) Introduction

modernization can make sense. Thus, for men to cooperate with
each other outside of Ian connections, they must not see each other
merely as sexual rivals . 4 And for them to learn easily things which
are not already “in the culture” requires that their vanity be mod-
erated, so that they do not become defensive about ignorance or
resentful of those who know more. In Japan, where modernization
appears on the whole to have been achieved syncretistically rather
than destructively, women were not veiled and kept apart; though
outwardly they seemed humble before men, they took full part in
domestic and agricultural life. Since Professor Lemer shows us
that women, even in the more advanced countries such as Lebanon,
remain far less educated and aware than men, and since sex roles
are so basically reinforced by patterns of child-rearing, the chances
for lessening the constraints of a “courage culture” do not strike
me as good in those parts of the Muslim world where the Prophet
has been read as bringing equality of races but not of men and
women.

Yet Mr. Lemer, being an American bred in what I suppose is
now the world’s leading example of an “ingenuity culture,” does
not lose heart as he contemplates the spectrum of Middle Eastern
misery. He takes up the countries of the area one by one, illuminat-
ing the immense disparities. He begins with the Turks, whose
political and social putsch under Kemal Atatiirk preceded the
coming of the newer media; hence, Atatiirk taught a generation
of Turks to read a modem script and got something of a head start
on literacy and industrialization. There is a benign poignancy
about the attitude of the Chief in Balgat, who has lost his moral
hegemony with the coming of roads and radios, and who told
Professor Lemer:

I am the last Muhtar of Balgat, and I am happy that I have seen Bal-
gat end its history in the way that we are going, . . . people will have to
get used to different ways and then some of the excesses, particularly
among the young, will disappear. The young people are in some ways
a serious disappointment; they think more of clothes and good times
than they do of duty and family and country. But it is to be hoped
that as the Demokrat men complete the work they have begun, the good
Turkish ways will again come forward to steady the people. 0 Mean-
while, it is well that people can have to eat and to buy shoes they always
needed but could not have. ...

Mr. Lemer journeys next to Lebanon, along with Turkey the

Introduction { 9 )

most “modem” of his group: Lebanon, with its commercial tra-
ditions; its attractive if precarious pluralism, including Christians,
Druzes, and various Muslim sects; its residual ties to France (ties
found among the more cosmopolitan in Turkey and Egypt, as in
all the Western world as well); and its sometimes courageous,
sometimes corrupt resistance to government by assassination.

No interviews were done in Israel, where colonists of European
origin often avow toward the Arabs a condescending outlook
reminiscent of the American colonists’ view of the Indians (there
are many courageous exceptions, as in the Ihud group), and where
a modem urban irredentist nationalism combines technocratic
superiority with traces of quasi-socialist, folk-society mystique.
Israel appears in this study only as one of the major symbols (in
Jordan, as perhaps now in Egypt, the major one) around which
the self-deracinating cadres of the neighboring countries seek to
define what they are not, in a war-dance as ambivalent (for these
men want technical superiority, too) as it is presently self-defeating.
Jordan, in fact, scarcely seems an entity in these interviews, which
range from Beduins, who know of the radio only that it is the
Voice of the Devil emanating from the effeminate cities, to exiled
Palestinian Arabs of the professional class listening to every stir
in the air-waves with embittered hope of return.

Whereas Lebanon appears stable enough to allow Mr. Lemer
to worry about its unfavorable trade balances, in Jordan and Syria
he worries about achieving any political balance amid the compet-
ing factions of the limited elites and their constituencies among the
“Transitionals.” In Egypt, as I have implied, he explores the “Nasser
syndrome,” the surrender of sensible socioeconomic goals for
strenuous symbolic ones, which stave off no births and pay no bills.
In Iran, he notices the emergence with Mossadegh of some of the
pseudo-'participative” patterns so marked in Egypt, although on
the whole Iran remains closest to tradition. Its elite have become
to some degree pawns of the Cold War, but they are not yet entirely
pawns of the mobs they have begun to arouse. Thus, in Iran the
leadership sometimes exploits its secular knowledge to serve tradi-
tional purposes, rather than tire “objective-historical” purposes a
Westerner would think made sense. And the moody ties that bind
the literate and the preliterate help give Iranian politics a fatalistic
rather than a desperate air.

( 10 ) Introduction

Mr. Lemer, proceeding in this country by country fashion, finds
himself making alternating uses of the different perspectives of the
established social sciences: economics in Lebanon, demography in
Egypt, public administration in Jordan and Iran. And these per-
spectives lead him to propose the strategies of rational growth, of
eschewing dreams and proceeding soberly along the paths to the
present already marked out by the historical experience of modern-
ization in the West. He even counsels the Lebanese to appoint public
offi cials on the basis of merit, not ethnicity— although their present
procedure does not seem so very different from the tactic of “racial
balance” in American electoral campaigns. Yet it is not the detailed
proposals but the general belief that there must be a way— a way
out of poverty and the psychic constriction of the “Traditionals”—
that links the author of this volume with his own national tradition.

But this very American belief that there is a way is a dream.
And Professor Lemer, as a student of communications, understands
that it is dreams that inspire not only new wants but new solutions
—as well as violent gestures toward modernity. What seems re-
quired from his perspectives is an allopathic rationing of dreams,
enough to spark the religion of progress, of advance, without inciting
to riot. (We can see in the behavior of our own juvenile delinquents
—also adept in imbibing the messages of the media— that this is not
easy to manage. The emotional and political fluency of newly-
liberated illiterates can be quite terrifying.) Bertrand Russell, in
his History of Western Philosophy, makes an analogous point
about the spread of ideas:

... a philosophy, developed in a politically and economically ad-
vanced country, which is, in its birthplace, little more than a clarification
and systematization of prevalent opinion, may become elsewhere a source
of revolutionary ardour and, ultimately, of actual revolution. It is mainly
through theorists that the maxims regulating the policy of advanced
countries become known to less advanced countries. In the advanced
countries, practice inspires theory; in the others theory inspires practice.

In Russell s sense, a movie image of life in Am erica, for all its
documentary detail, is a radical “theory” when it appears on the
screens of Cairo, Ankara, or Tehran.

Yet it is to the credit of American empathy and generosity, as
well as to our naivete, that we have been willing to promote that
theory, and to stand throughout the world as apostles of modernity.

Introduction ( 11 )

We may smile at the images of America that turn up in these inter-
views; the "clean and rich life” seen by a Turkish grammar school
graduate; the grocery store with “myriads of round boxes, clean
and all the same dressed, like soldiers in a great parade” 0 which
the grocer of Balgat, eager to visit America, had seen in a film;
the no less eloquent vision of an agricultural engineer:

Ever since I was a cliild I used to dream and think about people. I
used to imagine all people equal, having nice homes. In my imagination
I used to send their children to school and educate them. Now, as an
adult, I know that America is that country I used to dream about.

The British in the Arab world have tended to prefer the Chief
to tire Grocer, and perhaps the Beduin to the agronomist. They
have admired gentlemanly conduct more than die consumer or
trader mentality, “courage cultures” more dian "ingenuity cul-
tures.” Though diere are plenty of Americans who share the values
of T. E. Lawrence (or the metaphorically somewhat similar ones
of D. H. Lawrence), diese do not predominate in our view of the
Middle East, and of course not in our teaching at Robert College
or the American University of Beirut. Whatever our own misgivings
about the "great parade” of cans at the supermarket, whatever our
awareness that we do not live up to die dream of the Turkish
agronomist, and diat if we did, our life would srill lack meaning,
we cannot bring ourselves to begrudge others die literacies and
comforts that no longer wholly assuage us. Just as only an arro-
gant and heardess rich man can say to the poor man, “Why do
you want my job, with my troubles and taxes?,” so very few
Americans are likely to say to the Turks: “Don’t be like us,” and
even fewer to say: “Don’t be like us even in your own particu-
laristic way.”

Even so, there are a number of Americans who do feel this
way about preliterate tribes they have lived among as antiiropolo-
gists. They would hardly speak of “dieir” people, as Mr. Lemer
speaks of the Traditionals in this volume, as “constricted”; rather,
they may find tiiemselves challenged in their deepest premises,
whatever their professions of neutrality. Most anthropologists,

I believe, have felt tiiat admirable patterns of culture were perish-
ing on the periphery of the advancing West, and it was a major
wench of perspective for Margaret Mead, on returning to the
Manus after twenty-five years, not to be sad tiiat tiiey had opted

Introduction

(12)

for the American ideas of progress and democracy . 7 I have asked
myself why so little of this feeling, familiar enough to sociologists,
has found its way into Professor Lerner’s account. And it occurred
to me that it may be harder to love and admire illiterates than
preliterates. The former live in a world which is in part modem and
communicative. They have lost many of their most active and
enterprising spirits to that world, only a few of whom have re-
turned, as priests or doctors or agitators, to try to enlighten or
alleviate— or exploit— their own. In Fontemara Ignazio Silone im-
plies that the South Italian peasants whom he loves would he
better off if not even literate enough for speech, for then their
tyrants could only beat them, as they beat donkeys, but could not
sway or deceive them. Robert Redfield, who has written sensitively
on such matters, draws the distinction between peasants who live
within the ambiance of others’ literacy, gaining from it crumbs of
a culture not their own, and preliterates in a truly isolated orbit
(at least potentially so, as on relatively inaccessible islands or
pueblos ) who have built their own culture over time.

Then, too, quite apart from such theoretical distinctions, there
may be strong temperamental disharmonies between some cultures
and others, as between individuals who “should” like each other
but just dont. I recall a young anthropologist telling me how,
thoroughly steeped in cultural relativism, he had reacted only
sympathetically to ‘his” tribe of Central American Indians until
one day he found he couldn’t stand the way they kicked dogs—
all sorts of rites, and what Mr. Lerner would call constrictions,
did not faze him, but cruelty to dogs made him squirm. In what
I have said, I have already implied my own allergy to the op-
pression of women. Many of the Muslims described in this book
will strike some Americans as harsh without grandeur, superior
to women without gallantry. Charles Morris in Paths of Life indi-
cates on largely ideological grounds the strong antitheses between
Christian or Buddhist values and those of traditional Islam . 8

But stronger perhaps than ideological and religious differ-
ences are the barriers imposed by the growing wealth of Ameri-
cans m contrast to the increasing poverty of the overpopulated
coun les . e Egypt. Even our empathic strata, of which an-
opo ogists are among the avant-garde, have trouble under-
s an mg squalor where it is neither picturesque nor stable. And
e very act at non- Westerners have often incorporated many

Introduction ( 13 )

Western aspirations makes them either tongue-tied or fanatical
in seeking to expound their own values to us in terms we can
grasp.® Thus, while Mr. Lemer may approve of those Middle East
illiterates who appear to have moved away from tradition, it is
possible that the forms of tradition in question are, for him and
for many of us, simply among its less appealing versions.

But if that is so, it may work the other way, too, and make the
crossing of the historic barriers harder still. Perhaps this has some-
thing to do with the fact that "the” Arabs were once a great
civilization. The illiterate in his depression, and the modernizer in
his impatience, live amid the ruins of greatness. How open and how
empathic will Americans be, how magnanimous, if our turn comes
to live amid the ruins of our modernity?

While Mr. Lemer shows that every encounter with another
people is a confrontation with ourselves— a theme he develops in
observing how listening to the radio may at once unsettle people
and create feelings of identity among the newly unbound— his
major tasks in this book are, on the one hand, to present portraits
of the several countries (some of which are more "country-like”
than others) and, on the other hand, to develop a typology of
transition to illuminate both the portraits and the global movements
of peoples they represent. I want to say a few words in conclusion
about this typology. Most typologies in sociology are dualistic or
dichotomous: folk-urban; Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft ; status-to-con-
tract; cosmopolitan-local; sacred-secular; and so forth. Mr. Lemer’s
cast of characters puts the Modems on the one side— they are
cosmopolitan, urban, literate, usually well-off, and seldom devout—
and the Traditionals on the other side— they are just the opposite.
But in between he puts several categories of Transitionals: people
who share some of the empathy and psychic mobility of the Mod-
ems while lacking essential components of the Modem style,
notably literacy. These Transitionals are the men in motion, variously
proportioned in the different countries, who listen to American
jazz in Beirut, to the trusted BBC even in Cairo, to the Voice of the
Arabs and Radio Moscow in Damascus. Many of them don’t live
in a city— yet. But, already encouraged by the media into eco-
logical window-shopping, they can imagine living in one— even in
one outside their native land.

There are, however, evident technical problems about extrapol-

Introduction

( 14 )

ating from one-shot interviews into the careers of men in motion.
Thus, while the questionnaire got certain biographical data and
allowed one to see something of the interviewee’s orientation at
a specific point in time, yet “Transitional” is a dynamic category
—here presented without triangulation. Undoubtedly, some who
are categorized as “Transitional” are simply members for life of
a class which is open at both ends— a middle class; they may even
be a major source of their country’s transition without having them-
selves greatly altered their outlook or their exposure to the media.
(“Modem,” of course, is no fixed destiny, but a relative term: by
the time some "Transitionals” go “Modem,” that constellation will
have changed.)

Despite such ambiguities, inevitable in a first approximation,
I believe that Mr. Lemer is justified in using a moving term on
the basis of a snapshot interview— using a term, moreover, which
applies both to the respondent’s style of life and to his (highly
correlated) responsiveness to mass communications. For the au-
thor’s purposes are contemporary, not timeless, and they lead
him to emphasize what is changing and likely to change rather
than what, by high fortune or low, seems for the time being more
fully stabilized and polarized. However an individual in the Tran-
sitional bracket might describe his own fate, we, the outsiders,
view his destiny in terms of our preoccupations— which, never-
theless, are now also partially his— and we can, in terms of our
own history, visualize potentials in his attitudes which he himself
as yet lacks the insight to interpret. (How long a time will it be
before he is sending researchers to America and putting us in
categories beyond our own horizons?)

As I have said, the Transitional is defined as one who attends
to the mass media, but cannot read. What will a society look like
which is dominated by such “post-literate” types? What will reli-
ef 111 be like when freed both from oral tradition and from a book?

ese futures are hard to conceive, for print still has prestige all
over the world, partly because the elder statesmen were nurtured
on it, and partly because it has been the Western and Christian
road to advance (just as it has been the road among the Chinese
tav servants). In the West, print was the first mass medium, slowly

a S0 <. i. 6 neW f r me< ^ a l* ave been cumulative, and they have

upset old elites and old values only slowly. (Indeed, in the United
States, the media do not so much displace each other as displace

Introduction

(15)

other things, such as work and conversation. ) Eventually perhaps,
or so I would hope, the newer media may provide tie-ins to print,
so that people suckled on film and radio may be weaned on books.
We must never forget the enthusiasm for knowledge, for under-
standing, of people just a step away from Tradition— die hunger
for print of the Puritans, of the Russians in die 20’s, of the Mexi-
cans and the Filipinos today. A Syrian hairdresser expresses in
this book his great unhappiness because

I am illiterate and so can understand nothing about life. Another thing
that makes me unhappy is my inability to teach my only son, and I
can’t find the way how to do this.

A preliterate, of course, would not say that: he knows that he un-
derstands life, and tiiat Ins son will be taught the one and only
way. But on the evidence of this book and others in the same
demesne, there are very few preliterates left, and the illiterates are
no longer clear as to who they are, or as to “the way how.” In
diis sense, we are becoming one world, even while nationalism
and the search for technological prowess are supplying the false
and facile answers and the new illiteracy of seeming understanding.

Perspectives

I.

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable

THE VILLAGE of Balgat lies about eight kilometers out
of Ankara, in the southerly direction. It does not show on the
standard maps and it does not figure in the standard histories. I
first heard of it in the autumn of 1950 and most Turks have not
heard of it today. Yet the story of the Middle East today is en-
capsulated in the recent career of Balgat. Indeed the personal
meaning of modernization in underdeveloped lands can be traced,
in miniature, through the lives of two Balgati— The Grocer and
The Chief.

My first exposure to Balgat came while leafing through several
hundred interviews that had been recorded in Turkey during the
spring of 1950. One group caught my eye because of the under-
lying tone of bitterness in the interviewer’s summary of the village,
his earnest sense of the hopelessness of place and people. These
five interviews in Balgat were moving; even so, something in the
perspective seemed awry. For one thing, the interviewer was more
highly sensitized to what he saw than what he heard. The import
of what had been said to him, and duly recorded in his reports,
had somehow escaped his attention. I, having only the words to
go by, was struck by the disjunction between the reported face
and the recorded voice of Balgat. For another thing, the interviews
had been made in the early spring and I was reading them in the
late fall of 1950. Between these dates there had been a national
election in which, as a stunning surprise to everybody including
themselves, practically all qualified Turks had voted and the party
in power— Atatiirk’s own Halk Party— been turned out of office.

Nothing like this had ever happened before in Turkey, possibly

( 19 )

( 20 ) Perspectives

because neither universal suffrage nor an opposition party had
ever been tried before. The dazed experts could only say of this
epochal deed that the Anatolian villagers had done it. Since it
would be hard to imagine Anatolian villagers of more standard
pattern than the Balgati whose collected opinions were spread
before me, I had it on top authority that during the summer they
had entered History. But it was not immediately obvious by what
route.

What clues existed were in a few words spoken by the villagers.
These words we collated with die words that had been spoken to
the interviewers by hundreds of villagers and townspeople through-
out the Middle East. As we tabulated and cross-tabulated, a hunch
emerged of what in Balgat spoke for many men, many deeds. Com-
paring cases by class and country we gradually enlarged our minia-
ture into a panorama. Our hypothesis, heavy now with vivid
details and many meanings, took shape. Four years later an over-
size manuscript on die modernizing Middle East was in hand.
To see how close a fit to Middle East reality was given by our pic-
ture of it, I went out for a self-guided tour and final round of
interviews in the spring of 1954. My odyssey terminated where
my ideas originated: in Balgat, on the eve of a second national
election. With Balgat, then, our account begins.

Balgat Perceived: 1950

The interviewer who recorded Balgat on die verge— his name
was Tosun B.— had detected no gleam of the future during his so-
journ there. The village is a barren one,” he wrote. “The main
color is gray, so is the dust on the divan on which I am writing
now. Tosun was a serious young scholar from Ankara and he
loved the poor in his own fashion. He had sought out Balgat to

find the deadening past rather than the brave new world. He
found it:

I have seen quite a lot of villages in the barren mountainous East,
but never such a colorless, shapeless dump. This was the reason I chose

a r/Wl a ?, e L -l ? 0U !^ ^ ave ^ een half an hour to Ankara by car if it had
’f \ ! s . out two hours to the capital by car without almost
any road and is just forgotten, forsaken, right under

our noses.

T ° SUn also S0 *Sht and found persons to match the place. Of the
' he interviewed, his heart went straight out to the

O

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 21 )

village shepherd. What Tosun was looking for in this interview is
clear from his obiter dicta :

It was hard to explain to the village Chief that I wanted to interview
the poorest soul in the village. He, after long discussions, consented me
to interview the shepherd, but did not permit him to step into the guest-
room. He said it would be an insult to me, so we did the interview in
someone else’s room, I did not quite understand whose. The Chief did
not want to leave me alone with the respondent, but I succeeded at the
end. This opened the respondent’s sealed mouth, for he probably felt
that I, the superior even to his chief, rather be alone with him.

When the shepherd’s sealed mouth had been opened, little
came out. But Tosun was deeply stirred:

The respondent was literally in rags and in this cold weather he had
no shoe, but the mud and dirt on his feet were as thick as any boot. He
was small, but looked rugged and sad, very sad. He was proud of
being chosen by me and though limited tried his best to answer the
questions. Was so bashful that his blush was often evident under the
thick layer of dirt on his face. He at times threw loud screams of laugh-
ter when there was nothing to laugh about. These he expected to be
accepted as answers, for when I said "Well?” he was shocked, as if he
had already answered the question.

His frustration over the shepherd was not the only deprivation
Tosun attributed to the Chief, who “imposed himself on me all
the time I was in the village, even tried to dictate to me, which
I refused in a polite way. I couldn’t have followed his directions
as I would have ended up only interviewing his family.” Tosun
did succeed in talking privately with two Balgat farmers, but
throughout these interviews he was still haunted by the shepherd
and bedeviled by the Chief. Not until he came to interview the
village Grocer did Tosun find another Balgati who aroused in him
a comparable antipathy. Tosun’s equal hostility to these very dif-
ferent men made me curious. It was trying to explain this that
got me obsessed, sleeping and waking over the next four years,
with the notion that the parable of modem Turkey was the story
of The Grocer and The Chief.

Aside from resenting the containment strategy which the Chief
was operating against him, Tosun gave few details about tire man.
He reported only the impression that “the Muhtar is an unpleas-
ant old man. Looks mean and clever. He is the absolute dictator of
this little village.” Nor did Tosun elaborate his disapproval of the
Muhtars opinions beyond the comment that “years have left him

( 22 ) Perspectives

some sort of useless, mystic wisdom.” As a young man of empirical
temper, Tosun might be expected to respond with some diffidence
to the wisdom of the ancients. But the main source of Tosun’s
hostility, it appeared, was that the Chief made him nervous. His
notes concluded: “He found what I do curious, even probably sus-
pected it. I am sure he will report it to the first official who comes
to the village.”

Against the Grocer, however, Tosun reversed his neural field.
He quickly perceived that he made the Grocer nervous; and for
this Tosun disliked him. His notes read:

The respondent is comparatively the most city-like dressed man in
the village. He even wore some sort of a necktie. He is the villages
only grocer, but he is not really a grocer, but so he is called, originally
the food-stuffs in his shop are much less than the things to be worn,
like the cheapest of materials and shoes and slippers, etc. His greatest
stock is drinks and cigarettes which he sells most. He is a very unimpres-
sive type, although physically he covers quite a space. He gives the
impression of a fat shadow. Although he is on the same level with the
other villagers, when there are a few of the villagers around, he seems to
want to distinguish himself by keeping quiet, and as soon as they depart
he starts to talk too much. This happened when we were about to start
the interview. He most evidently wished to feel that he is closer to me
than he is to them and was curiously careful with his accent all during
the interview. In spite of his unique position, for he is the only unfarming
person and the only merchant in the village, he does not seem to possess
an important part of the village community. In spite of all his efforts,
he is considered by the villagers even less than the least farmer. Although
he presented to take the interview naturally, he was nervous and also
was proud to be interviewed although he tried to hide it.

All of this pushed up a weighty question: Why did the Chief
make Tosun nervous and why did Tosun make the Grocer nervous?
These three men, representing such different throughtways and
lifeways, were a test for each other. Looking for answers, I turned
to the responses each had made to the 57 varieties of opinions
called for by the standard questionnaire used in Tosun’s interviews.

The Chief was a man of few words on many subjects. He dis-
missed most of the items on Tosun’s schedule with a shrug or its
audible equivalent. But he was also a man of many words on a
few subjects— those having to do with the primary modes of human
deportment Only when the issues involved first principles of con-
duct did he consider the occasion appropriate for pronouncing
judgment. Of the Chief it might be said, as Henry Tames said of

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 23 )

George Eliot’s salon style, “Elle riaborde que les grandcs themes.”

The Chief has so little trouble with first principles because he
desires to be, and usually is, a vibrant soundbox through which
echo the traditional Turkish virtues. His themes are obedience,
courage, loyalty— the classic values of the Ottoman Imperium re-
incarnate in the Atatiirk Republic. For the daily round of village
life these are adequate doctrine; and as the Chief has been out-
side of his village only to fight in two wars he has never found his
austere code wanting. This congruence of biography with ideology
explains the Chief’s confidence in his own moral judgment and
his short definition of a man. When asked what he wished for his
two grown sons, for example, the Chief replied promptly: “I hope
they will fight as bravely as we fought and know how to die as
my generation did.”

From this parochial fund of traditional virtues, the Chief drew
equally his opinions of great men, nations, issues. The larger dramas
of international politique he judged solely in terms of the courage
and loyalty of the actors, invoking, to acknowledge their magni-
tude, the traditional rhetoric of aphorism. Generations of Anatolian
Muhtars resonated as he pronounced his opinion of the British:

I hear that they have turned friends with us. But always stick to the
old wisdom: “A good enemy is better than a bad friend.” You cannot
rely on them. Who has heard of a son being friends with his father’s
murderers?

With his life in Balgat, as with the Orphic wisdom that supplies
its rationale, the Chief is contented. At 63 his desires have been
quieted and his ambitions achieved. To Tosun’s question on con-
tentment he replied with another question:

What could be asked more? God has brought me to this mature age
without much pain, has given me sons and daughters, has put me at
the head of my village, and has given me strength of brain and body at
this age. Thanks be to Him.

The Grocer is a very different style of man. Though bom and
bred in Balgat, he lives in a different world, an expansive world,
populated more actively with imaginings and fantasies— hungering
for whatever is different and unfamiliar. Where the Chief is con-
tented, the Grocer is restless. To Tosun’s probe, the Grocer replied
staccato: “I have told you I want better things. I would have liked
to have a bigger grocery shop in the city, have a nice house there,
dress nice civilian clothes.”

( 24 ) Perspectives

Where the Chief audits his life placidly, makes no comparisons,
thanks God, the Grocer evaluates his history in a more compli-
cated and other-involved fashion. He perceives his story as a drama
of Self versus Village. He compares his virtue with others and
finds them lacking: “I am not like the others here. They don't know
any better. And when I tell them, they are angry and they say that
I am ungrateful for what Allah has given me.” The Grocer s strug-
gle with Balgat was, in his script, no mere conflict of personalities.
His was the lonely struggle of a single man to open the village
mind. Clearly, from the readiness and consistency of his responses
to most questions, he had brooded much over his role. He had a
keen sense of the limits imposed by reality: “I am bom a grocer
and probably die that way. I have not the possibility in myself
to get the things I want. They only bother me.” But desire, once
stirred, is not easily stilled.

Late in the interview, after each respondent had named ihe
greatest problem facing the Turkish people, Tosun asked what he
would do about this problem if he were the president of Turkey,
Most responded by stolid silence— the traditional way of handling
“projective questions” which require people to imagine themselves
or things to be different from what they “really are.” Some were
shocked by the impropriety of the very question. “My GodI How
can you say such a thing?” gasped the shepherd. “How can I . . .
I cannot ... a poor villager . . . master of the whole world .” 1

The Chief, Balgat’s virtuoso of the traditional style, made
laconic reply to this question with another question: “I am hardly
able to manage a village, how shall I manage Turkey?” When Tosun
probed further (“What would you suggest for your village that
you cannot handle yourself?”), the Chief said he would seek “help
of money and seed for some of our farmers.” When the Grocers
turn came, he did not wait for the question to be circumscribed
in terms of local reference. As president of Turkey, he said: “I
would make roads for the villagers to come to towns to see the
world and would not let them stay in their holes all their life.”

To get out of his hole the Grocer even declared himself ready
—and in this he was quite alone in Balgat— to live outside of
Turkey. This came out when Tosun asked another of his projective
questions: If you could not live in Turkey, where would you want
to h ve ? The standard reply of the villagers was that they would

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 25 )

not live, could not imagine living, anywhere else. The forced
choice simply was ignored.

When Tosun persisted (“Suppose you had to leave Turkey?”)
he teased an extreme reaction out of some Balgati. The shepherd,
like several other wholly routinized personalities, finally replied
that be would rather kill himself. The constricted peasant can more
easily imagine destroying the self than relocating it in an unknown,
i.e. frightful, setting.

The Chief again responded with the clear and confident voice
of traditional man. ‘“Nowhere,” he said. “I was horn here, grew
old here, and hope God will permit me to die here.” To Tosun’s
probe, the Chief replied firmly: “I wouldn't move a foot from
here.” Only the Grocer found no trouble in imagining himself
outside of Turkey, living in a strange land. Indeed he seemed
fully prepared, as a man does when he has already posed a ques-
tion to himself many times. “America,” said the Grocer, and, with-
out waiting for Tosun to ask him why, stated his reason: “because
I have heard that it is a nice country, and with possibilities to be
rich even for the simplest persons.”

Such opinions clearly marked off the Grocer, in the eyes of the
villagers around him, as heterodox and probably infidel. The vivid
sense of cash displayed by the Grocer was a grievous offense
against Balgat ideas of tabu talk. In the code regulating the flow
of symbols among Anatolian villagers, blood and sex are permissible
objects of passion but money is not. To talk much of money is an
impropriety. To reveal excessive desire for money is— Allah defend
us!— an impiety . 2

Balgati might forgive the Grocer his propensity to seek the
strange rather than reverse the familiar, even his readiness to
forsake Turkey for unknown places, had he decently clothed these
impious desires in pious terms. But to abandon Balgat for the
world's fleshpots, to forsake the ways of God to seek the ways of
cash, this was insanity. The demented person who spoke thus
was surely accursed and unclean.

The Grocer, with h is “city-dressed” ways, his “eye at the higher
places” and his visits to Ankara, provoked the Balgati to wrathful
and indignant restatements of the old code. But occasional, and
apparently trivial, items in the survey suggested that some Balgati
were talking loud about the Grocer to keep their own inner voices
from being overheard by the Chief— or even by themselves.

( 26 ) Perspectives

As we were interested in knowing who says what to whom
in such a village as Balgat, Tosun had been instructed to ask
each person whether others ever came to him for advice, and
if so what they wanted advice about. Naturally, the Balgati
whose advice was most sought was the Chief, who reported:
“Yes, that is my main duty, to give advice. (Tosun: What about?)
About all that I or you could imagine, even about their wives
and how to handle them, and how to cure their sick cow.” This
conjunction of wives and cows, to illustrate all the Chief could
imagine, runs the gamut only from A to B. These are the species
that the villager has most to do with in his daily round of life,
the recurrent source of his pains and pleasures and puzzlements.
The oral literature abounds in examples of Muhtar (or his theo-
logical counterpart, the Hoca ) as wise man dispensing judgment
equally about women and cows, y ; 7.’

Rather more surprising was Tosun’s discovery that some Bal-
gati went for advice also to the disreputable Grocer. What did
they ask his advice about? “What to do when they go to Ankara,
where to go and what to buy, how much to sell their things.” The
cash nexus, this suggested, was somehow coming to Balgat and
with it, possibly, a new role for the Grocer as cosmopolitan
specialist in how to avoid wooden nickels in the big city. Also,
how to spend the real nickels one got. For the Grocer was a man
of clear convictions on which coffee-houses played the best radio
programs and which were the best movies to see in Ankara.
While his opinions on these matters were heterodox as compared
say, to the Chief s, they had an open field to work in. Most Bal-
gati had never heard a radio or seen a movie and were not aware
of what constituted orthodoxy with respect to them. Extremists
had nonetheless decided that these things, being new, were ob-
viously evil. Some of them considered the radio to be “the voice
of The Devil coming from his deep hiding-place” and said they
would smash any such “Devil’s -box” on sight. ^2. 1 / 2 . j

At the time of Tosun s visit, there was only one radio in Balgat,
owned by no less a personage than the Chief. In the absence of
any explicit orthodox prohibition on radio, the Chief, former soldier
and great admirer of Ataturk, had followed his lead. Prosperous
by village standards, being the large landowner of Balgat, he had
bought a radio to please and instruct his sons. He had also de-
vised an appropriate ceremonial for 11CO TT n nh At rom'nfT Q CpIp.P.f!

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 27 )

group of Balgati foregathered in the Chiefs guest room as he
turned on the newscast from Ankara. They heard the newscast
through in silence and, at its conclusion, the Chief turned the
radio off and made bis commentary. “We all listen very care-
fully,” he told Tosun, "and I talk about it a'fterwards.” Tosun,
suspecting in this procedure a variant of the Chiefs containment
tactics, wanted to know whether there was any disagreement over
his explanations. “No, no arguments,” replied the Chief, “as I
tell you I only talk and our opinions are the same more or less.”
Here was a new twist in the ancient role of knowledge as power.
Sensing the potential challenge from radio, the Chief restricted
the dangers of innovation by partial incorporation, thus retaining
and strengthening his role as Balgat’s official opinion leader.

Tosun inquired of the Grocer, an occasional attendant at the
Chiefs salon, how he liked this style of radio session. The grocer,
a heretic perhaps but not a foolhardy one, made on this point
the shortest statement in his entire interview: ‘The Chief is clever
and he explains the news.” Only obliquely, by asking what the
Grocer liked best about radio, did Tosun get an answer that had
the true resonance. Without challenging the Chiefs preference
for news of “wars and the danger of wars”— in fact an exclusive
interest in the Korean War, to which a Turkish brigade had just
been committed— the Grocer indicated that after all he had oppor-
tunities to listen in the coffee-houses of Ankara, where the audiences
exhibited a more cosmopolitan range of interests. “It is nice to
know what is happening in the other capitals of the world,” said
the Grocer. "We are stuck in this hole, we have to know what is
going on outside our village.”

The Grocer had his own aesthetic of the movies as well.
Whereas the Chief had been to the movies several times, he
viewed them mainly as a moral prophylactic: “There are fights,
shooting. The people are brave. My sons are always impressed.
Each time they see such a film they wish more and more then-
time for military service would come so that they would become
soldiers too.” For the Grocer, movies were more than a homily
on familiar themes. They were his avenue to the wider world of
his dreams. It was in a movie that he had first glimpsed what a
real grocery store could be like— “with walls made of iron sheets,
top to floor and side to side, and on them standing myriads of
round boxes, clean and all the same dressed, like soldiers in a

( 28 ) Perspectives

great parade.” This fleeting glimpse of what sounds like the
Campbell Soup section of an A & P supermarket had provided
the Grocer with an abiding image of how his fantasy world might
look. It was here, quite likely, that he had shaped the ambition
earlier confided to Tosun, “to have a bigger grocery shop in the
city.” No pedantries intervened in the Grocer’s full sensory rela-
tionship to the movies. No eye had he, like the Chief, for their
value as filial moral rearmament and call to duty. The Grocer’s
judgments were formed in unabashedly hedonist categories. “The
Turkish ones,” he said, “are gloomy, ordinary. I can guess at the
start of the film how it will end. . . . The American ones are ex-
citing. You know it makes people ask what will happen next?”

Here, precisely, arose the local variant of a classic question.
In Balgat, the Chief carried the sword, but did the Grocer steer
the pen? When Balgati sought his advice on how to get around
Ankara, would they then go to movies that taught virtue or
those that taught excitement? True, few villagers had ever been
to Ankara. But things were changing in Turkey and many more
Balgati were sure to have a turn or two around the big city be-
fore they died. What would happen next in Balgat if more people
discovered the tingle of wondering what will happen next? Would
things continue along the way of the Chief or would they take
the way of the Grocer?

Balgat Revisited: 1954

I reached Ankara in April after a circuitous route through the
Middle East. The glories of Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Persia
touched me only lightly, for some part of me was already in
Balgat. Even the Blue Mosque and St. Sophia seemed pallid,
and I left Istanbul three days ahead of schedule for Ankara. I
had saved this for last, and now here I was. I was half afraid
to look.

I called a transportation service and explained that I wanted
to go out the following day, a Sunday, to a village some eight
kilometers south that might be hard to reach. As I wanted to
spend the day, would the driver meet me at 8 a.m. and bring
along his lunch?

While waiting for the car, next morning, my reverie wandered
back through the several years since my first reading of the Balgat

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 29 )

interviews. Was I chasing a phantom? Tahir S. appeared. With
solitude vanished anxiety; confidently we began to plan the day.
Tahir had been a member of the original interview team, working
in the Izmir area. As Tosun had joined the Turkish foreign serv-
ice and was stationed in North Africa, where he was conducting
an inquiiy among the Berbers, I had arranged in advance for
Tahir to revisit Balgat with me in his place. Over a cup of syrupy
coffee, we reviewed the questions that had been asked in 1950,
noted the various responses and silences, decided the order in
which we would repeat the old questions and interpolate the
new ones.

As the plan took shape, Zilla K. arrived. She had no connection
with the original survey, but I wanted a female interviewer who
could add some Balgat women to our gallery. I had "ordered”
her, through a colleague at Ankara University, “by the numbers”:
thirtyish, semi-trained, alert, compliant with instructions, not sexy
enough to impede our relations with the men of Balgat but chic
enough to provoke the women. A glance and a word showed that
Zilla filled the requisition. We brought her into the plan of oper-
ations. The hall porter came in to say our car was waiting. We
got in and settled back for a rough haul. Twenty minutes later,
as we were still debating the niceties of question-wording and re-
porting procedure, the driver said briskly: "There’s Balgat.”

We looked puzzled at each other until Tosun’s words of 1950
recurred to us: “It could have been half an hour to Ankara if
it had a road.” Now it did have a road. What was more, a bus
was coming down the road, heading toward us from the place
our driver had called Balgat. As it passed, jammed full, none
of the passengers waved or even so much as stuck out a tongue
at us. Without these unfailing signs of villagers out on a rare
chartered bus, to celebrate a great occasion of some sort, we
could only make the wild guess that Balgat had acquired a
regular bus service. And indeed, as we entered the village, there
it was— a “bus station,” freshly painted benches under a hand-
some new canopy. We got out and looked at the printed schedule
of trips. “The bus leaves every hour, on the hour, to Ulus Station.
Fare: 20 Kuruj.” For about 4 cents, Balgati could now go, when-
ever they felt the whim, to Ulus in the heart of Ankara. The
villagers were getting out of their holes at last. The Grocer, I
thought, must be grinning over the fat canary he had swallowed.

( 30 ) Perspectives

We took a quick turn around the village, on our way to check
in with the Chief. Things looked different from what Tosun’s
report had led us to expect. Overhead wires were stretched along
the road, with branch lines extended over the houses of Balgat
The village had been electrified. Alongside the road deep ditches
had been dug, in which the graceful curve of new water pipe
was visible. Purified water was coming to Balgat. There were
many more buildings than the 50-odd Tosun had counted, and
most of them looked new. Two larger ones announced themselves
as a school and a police station. An inscription on the latter re-
vealed that Balgat was now under the jurisdiction of the Ankara
district police. They had finally got rid of the gendarmerie, scav-
engers of the Anatolian village and historic blight on the peasant’s
existence. “These fellows are lucky,” said Tahir drily. Feeling
strange, we made our way along the erratic path through the
old village, led and followed by a small horde of children, to
the house of the Chief. Tahir knocked, an old woman with her
head covered by a dark shawl appeared, the children scattered.
We were led into the guest room.

The Chief looked as I had imagined. His cheeks a bit more
sunken, perhaps, but the whole presence quite familiar. Tall, lean,
hard, he walked erect and looked me straight in the eye. His own
eyes were Anatolian black and did not waver as he stretched out
a handful of long, bony fingers. “Gun aydin, Bey Efendim he
said. “Good day, sir, you are welcome to my house.” I noted in
turn the kindness which opens a door to strangers and the Chief
responded that we honored his house by our presence. This com-
pleted the preliminary round of formules de politesse and steam-
ing little cups of Turkish coffee were brought in by the Chiefs
elder son. The son was rather a surprise— short, pudgy, gentle-
eyed and soft spoken. He bowed his head, reddening slightly as
he stammered, “Liitfen” (Please!) and offered the tray of demi-
tasses to me. I wondered whether he had learned to fight bravely
and die properly.

As the Chief set down his second cup of coffee, signifying that •
we could now turn to the business of our visit, I explained that I
had come from America, where I taught in a university, with
the hope of meeting him. There, in my own country, I had read
about Balgat in some writing by a young man from Ankara who,
four years ago, had talked at length with the Chief and other

The Grocer and The Chief: A. Parable ( 31 )

persons in his village. This writing had interested me very much
and I had often wondered, as the years passed by, how things were
going in the village of Balgat and among its people. Wien I had
the opportunity to come to Turkey I immediately decided that I
would visit Balgat and see the Chief if I could.

The Chief heard me through gravely, and when he spoke I
knew I was in. He bypassed the set of formulas available to him
—for rejecting or evading my implied request— and responded di-
rectly to the point. I was right to have come to see Balgat for
myself. He remembered well the young man from Ankara (his
description of Tosun in 1950 was concise and neutrally-toned).
Much had changed in Balgat since that time. Indeed, Balgat was
no longer a village. It had, only last month, been incorporated as
a district of Greater Ankara. This was why they now had a new
headquarters of Metropolitan police, and a bus service, and elec-
tricity, and a supply of pure water that would soon be in operation.
Where there had been 50 houses there were now over 500, and
even he, the Muhtar, did not know any more all the people living
here.

Yes he had lived in Balgat all his life and never in all that time
seen so much happen as had come to pass in these four years:

It all began with the election that year. The Demokrat men came
to Balgat and asked us what was needed here and told us they would
do it when they were elected. They were brave to go against the gov-
ernment part)'. We all voted for them, as the Halk men knew no more
what to do about the prices then, and the new men did what they said.
They brought us tin's road and moved out the gendarmerie. Times have
been good with us here. We are all Demokrat party here in Balgat now.

The Chief spoke in a high, strong, calm voice, and the manner
of his utterance was matter-of-fact. His black eyes remained clear
as he gazed steadily at the airspace adjoining my left ear, and
his features retained their shape. Only his hands were animated,
though he invoked only the thumbs and the index fingers for punc-
tuation. When he had completed his statement, he picked his nose
thoughtfully for a moment and then laid the finger alongside the
bridge. The tip of the long, bony finger reached into his eyesocket
I explained then that the young lady had come with us to learn
how such changes as the Chief mentioned were altering the daily
round for village women. Might she talk with some of them while

( 32 ) Perspectives

Tahir Bey and I were meeting the men? The Chief promptly sug-
gested that Zilla could speak with the females of his household.
(Tosun’s resentful remark that, had he followed the Chiefs sug-
gestions, “I would have ended up only interviewing his family”
came back to me later that evening, when Zilla reported on her
interviews with the Chief s wife and daughters-in-law. All three had
identified Balgafs biggest problem as the new fashion of young
men to approach girls shamelessly on the village outskirts— precisely
what the Chief had told me in answer to the same question. Tosun
had been wise. ) But if the Chief still used his containment tactics
with tlie women, in other directions he had taken a decidedly per-
missive turn. Tahir and I, he said, could walk about Balgat entirely
as we wished and speak with whomsoever it pleased us to honor-
even, he added with a smile in response to my jest, some non-
Demokrat Party men, if we could find any. We chatted a bit longer
and then, having agreed to return to the Chief s house, we set out
for a stroll around Balgat. Our next goal was to find the Grocer.

After a couple of bends and turns, we came to a coffee-house.
Here was something new and worth a detour. We stopped at the
door and bade the proprietor “Gun aydin!” He promptly rushed
forward with two chairs, suggested that we sit outdoors to benefit
of the pleasant sunshine, and asked us how we would like our
coffee. ( There are five ways of specifying the degree of sweetening
one likes in Turkish coffee. ) Obviously, this was to be on the house,
following the paradoxical Turkish custom of giving gratis to those
who can best afford to pay. In a matter of minutes, the male
population of Balgat was assembled around our two chairs, squat-
ting, sitting on the ground, looking us over with open and friendly
curiosity, peppering Tahir with questions about me.

When our turn came, the hierarchy of respondents was already
clear from the axis along which their questions to us had been
aligned. Top man was one of the two farmers Tosun had inter-
viewed in 1950. He too was tall, lean, hard. He wore store-clothes
with no patches and a sturdy pair of store-shoes. His eyes were
Anatolian black and his facial set was much like the Chiefs. But
his body was more relaxed and his manner more cocky. He sat
with his chair tilted back and kept his hands calmly dangling
alongside. This seemed to excise punctuation from his discourse
and he ambled along, in response to any question, with no apparent
> > in view. Interrupting him, even long enough to steer his

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 33 )

flow of words in another direction, was— the obvious deference
of the whole group toward him constrained us— not easy. His voice
was deep and harsh, with the curious suggestion of strangling in
die throat diat Anatolian talk sometimes has. The content was
elusive and little of his discourse made concrete contact with my
notebook.

As I review my notes on that tour of monologue-with-choral-
murmurs, he appears to have certified the general impression that
many changes had occurred in Balgat. His inventory included, at
unwholesome length, all the by-now familiar items: road, bus,
electricity, water. In his recital these great events did not acquire
a negative charge, but they lost some of their luster. The tough
old fanner did not look shining at new styles of architecture, nor
did he look scowling, but simply looked. Under his gaze the new
roofs in Balgat were simply new roofs. The wonder that these new
roofs were in Balgat shone in other eyes and cadenced other voices.

These other voices were finally raised. Either the orator had
exhausted die prerogative of his position (he had certainly ex-
hausted Tahir S., whose eyes were glazed and vacant) or the issue
was grave enough to sanction discourtesy toward a village elder.
The outburst came when the quondam fanner undertook to explain
why he was no longer a fanner. He had retired, over a year ago,
because there was none left in Balgat to do an honest days work
for an honest day’s lira. Or rather two lira (about 36 cents)— the
absurd rate, he said, to which the daily wage of farm laborers had
been driven by the competition of the voracious Ankara labor
market. Now, all the so-called able-bodied men of Balgat had
forsaken the natural work praised by Allah and swarmed off to
die Ankara factories where, for eight hours of so-called work,
they could get five lira a day. As for himself, he would have none
of diis. Rather than pay men over two lira a day to do the work
of men, he had rented out his land to others and retired. He was
rich, his family would eat, and others might do as they wished.

The protests diat rose did not aim to deny these facts, but simply
to justify them. Surprised, we asked whether it was indeed true
tiiat there were no farm laborers left in Balgat any more. “How
many of you,” we quickly rephrased the question, “work on farms
now?” Four hands were raised among the 29 present, and all of
diese turned out to be small holders working their own land. ( These
four were sitting together and, it later turned out, were the only

( 34 ) Perspectives

four members of the Halk Party among the group, the rest being
vigorous Demokrat men.)

Galvanized by the intelligence now suddenly put before us
(even Tahir S. had reawakened promptly upon discovering that
there were hardly any farmers left in Balgat), we started to fire
a battery of questions on our own. As this created a din of respond-
ing voices, Tahir S.— once again the American-trained interviewer
—restored order by asking each man around the circle to tell us,
in turn, what he was now working at and how long he had been
at it. This impromptu occupational census, begun on a leisurely
Sunday, was never quite completed. As it became clear that most
of the male population of Balgat was now in fact working in
the factories and construction gangs of Ankara — for cash — our own
impatience to move on to our next questions got the better of us.

How did they spend the cash they earned? Well, there were
now over 100 radio receivers in Balgat as compared to the lone
receiver Tosun had found four years earlier. There were also seven
refrigerators, four tractors, three trucks, and one Dodge sedan.
Most houses now had electric lights and that had to be paid for.
Also, since there was so little farming in Balgat now, much of
the food came from the outside (even milk!) and had to be
bought in the grocery stores, of which there were now seven in
Balgat. Why milk? Well, most of the animals had been sold off
during the last few years. What about the shepherd? Well, he
had moved to a village in the east a year or so ago, as there were
no longer any flocks for him to tend. How was the Grocer doing?
“Which one?” The original one, the great fat one that was here
four years ago? “O, that one, he's dead!”

Tahir S. later told me that my expression did not change
when the news came (always the American-trained interviewer!).
I asked a few more questions in a normal way— ‘What did he die
of? “How long ago?”— and then let the questioning pass to Tahir.
I don’t recall what answers came to my questions or to his. I
do recall suddenly feeling very weary and, as the talk went on,
slightly sick. The feeling got over to Tahir S. and soon we were
saying goodbye to the group, feeling relieved that the ritual for
leavetaking is less elaborate than for arriving. We promised to
return and said our thanks. “Giile, gtile” answered those who
remained. ( Smile, smile, signifying farewell. )

What a lousy break,” growled Tahir in a tone of reasonable

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 35 )

indignation as we started back toward the house of the Chief. He
•was speaking of the Grocer. I didn’t know what to say by way
of assent. I felt only a sense of large and diffuse regret, of which
indignation was not a distinct component. "Tough,” I agreed. As
we came up to the Chiefs house, I told Tahir we might as well
return to Ankara. We had gathered quite a lot of information al-
ready and might better spend the afternoon putting it together.
We could come back the next day to interview the Chief. The
Chief agreed to this plan and invited me to be his guest for lunch
next day. We collected Zilla K. and our driver and drove back
to the city. Zilla did most of the talking, while Tahir and I
listened passively. The driver said only, as I paid him, “I didn’t
need to bring along my lunch after all.”

The Passing of Balgat

While dressing slowly, the next morning, I planned my strategy
for lunch with the Chief. Had he learned anything from the
Grocer? Clearly his larger dues to the shape of the future had
come from Atatiirk, whose use of strong measures for humane
new goals had impressed him deeply as a young man. But surely
he had also responded to the constant stimuli supplied by the
Grocer, whose psychic antennae were endlessly seeking the new
future here and now. The Chief, rather consdously reshaping his
ways in the Atatiirk image, had to be reckoned a major figure
in the Anatolian transformation. But the restless sensibility of the
Grocer also had its large, inadequately defined, place. Whereas the
masterful Chief had been able to incorporate change mainly by
rearranging the environment, the nervous Grocer had been obliged
to operate through the more painful process of rearranging him-
self. Most villagers were closer to his situation than to the Chief s.
The Grocer then was my problem and, as symbol of the char-
acterological shift, my man. It was he who dramatized most
poignantly the personal meaning of the big change now under
way throughout the Middle East.

I recalled Tosun’s unflattering sketch of him as an anxiety-
ridden pusher, an “unfarming person” who “even wore some sort
of necktie.” What had located these details, what had made the
Grocer a man I recognized, was Tosun’s acid remark: "He most
evidently wished to feel that he is closer to me than he is to [other

( 36 ) Perspectives

villagers] and was curiously careful with his accent all during the
interview.” Tosun had seen this as vulgar social climbing, but
there was something in tin's sentence that sounded to me like His-
tory. Maybe it was the 18th century field-hand of England who
had left the manor to find a better life in London or Manchester.
Maybe it was the 19th century French farm lad, wearied by his
father’s burdens of faille and tithe, who had gone off to San Fran-
cisco to hunt gold and, finding none, had then tried Ins hand as
mason, mechanic, printer’s devil; though none of these brought
him fortune, he wrote home cheerfully (in a letter noted by the
perspicacious Karl Marx) about this exciting new city where the
chance to try his hand at anything made him feel “less of a mol-
lusk and more of a man.” Maybe it was the 20th century Polish
peasant crossing continent and ocean to Detroit, looking for a
“better ’ole” in the new land.

The Grocer of Balgat stood for some part of all these figures
as he nervously edged his psyche toward Tosun, the young man
from the big city. I’m like you, the Grocer might have been feel-
ing, or I’d like to be like you and wish I could get the chance. It
was harsh of Tosun, or perhaps only the anti-bourgeois impatience
of an austere young scholar looking for die suffering poor in a
dreary village, to cold-shoulder this fat and middle-aged man
yearning to be comfortably rich in an interesting city. But the
Grocer had his own sort of toughness. He had, after all, stood up
to the o tlier villagers and had insisted, even when they labeled
him infidel, that they ought to get out of their holes. Though dead,
he had won an important victory. For the others, despite their out-
raged virtues, had started to come around, once they began to
get the feel of Ankara cash, for advice on how to get out of their
holes. Had they also acquired, along with their new sense of cash,
some feel for the style of life the Grocer had desired? That was
what I wanted to find out in Balgat today.

I walked out of the hotel toward Ulus station, just around the
comer. This time I was going to Balgat by bus, to see how the
villagers traveled. We crowded into a shiny big bus from Germany
that held three times as many passengers as there were seats. The
bus was so new that the signs warning the passengers not to smoke
or spit or talk to the driver (while the bus is moving) in German,
French, and English had not yet been converted into Turkish.
There was, in fact, a great deal of smoking and several animated

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 37 )

conversations between the driver and various passengers occurred,
in the intervals between which the driver chatted with a crony
whom he had brought along for just this purpose.

In Balgat I reported directly to the Chief. He appeared, after
a few minutes, steaming and mopping his large forehead. He had
been pruning some trees and, in this warm weather, such work
brought the sweat to his brow. This was about the only work he
did any more, he explained, as he had sold or rented most of his
land in the last few years, keeping for himself only the ground
in which he had planted a small grove of trees that would be his
memorial on earth. Islamic peoples regard a growing and "eternal”
thing of nature, preferably a tree, as a fitting monument, and a
comfortable Muslim of even diffident piety will usually be scrupu-
lous in observing this tradition— a sensible one for a religion of
the desert, where vegetation is rare and any that casts a shade is
especially prized. The Chief agreed to show me his trees and as
we strolled away from the house he resumed his discourse of
yesterday.

Things had changed, he repeated, and a sign of the gravity of
these changes was that he— of a lineage that had always been
Muhtars and landowners— was no longer a farmer. Nor was he long
to be Muhtar. After the coming election, next month, the incor-
poration of Balgat into Greater Ankara was to be completed and
thereafter it would be administered under the general municipal
system. “I am the last Muhtar of Balgat, and I am happy that I
have seen Balgat end its history in this way that we are going.”
The new ways, then, were not bringing evil with them?

No, people will have to get used to different ways and then some of
the excesses, particularly among the young, will disappear. The young
people are in some ways a serious disappointment; they think more of
clothes and good times than they do of duty and family and country.
But it is to be hoped that as the Democrat men complete the work they
have begun, the good Turkish ways will again come forward to steady
the people. Meanwhile, it is well that people can have to eat and to
buy shoes they always needed but could not have.

And as his two sons were no longer to be farmers, what of them?
The Chiefs voice did not change, nor did his eyes cloud over, as
he reph'ed:

They are as the others. They think first to serve themselves and not
the nation. They had no wish to go to the battle in Korea, where Turkey

( 38 ) Perspectives

fights before the eyes of all the world. They are my sons and I speak
no ill of them, but I say only that they are as all the others.

I felt at tliis moment a warmth toward the Chief which I had
not supposed he would permit himself to evoke. His sons had not,
after all, learned to fight bravely and die properly. His aspiration-
which had led him, four years earlier, to buy a radio so his sons
would hear the Korean war news and to see movies that would
make them “wish more and more their time for military service
would come”— had not been fulfilled. Yet the old Chief bore stoically
what must have been a crushing disappointment. These two sons
through whom he had hoped to relive his own bright dreams of
glory had instead become shopkeepers. The elder son owned a
grocery store and the younger one owned Balgat’s first clothing
store. With this news, curiosity overcame sympathy. I rattled off
questions on this subject which, clearly, the Chief would rather
have changed. As we turned back to the house, he said we would
visit the shops after lunch and his sons would answer all my
questions.

Lunch consisted of a huge bowl of yogurt, alongside of which
was stacked a foot-high pile of village-style bread, freshly baked
by the Chief s wife and served by his younger daughter-in-law. Vil-
lage bread fresh from the oven is one of the superior tastes that
greets a visitor. As I went to work with obvious relish, the Chief
suggested that I eat only the "comer” of each sheet. Village bread
is baked in huge round double sheets, each about the diameter of
a manhole cover and the thickness of a dime. A large glob of
shortening is spread loosely around the center between the sheets,
which are baked together around the circumference. These sheets
are then folded over four times, making the soft buttery center into
a “comer.” The comer is the prerogative of the male head of the
household, who may choose to share it with a favored child. To
invite a guest to eat only the comers is, in the frugal Anatolian
village, a sign of special cordiality that cannot be ignored.

-As I chewed my way happily through a half-dozen comers, I
wondered who was going to be stuck with my stack of comerless
circumferences. Mama and the daughters-in-law? I asked about
the children and learned that, as befits the traditional extended
family, the Chief now had nine descendants living under his roof.
Moreover, while some were taking to new ways, his grandchildren
had been and were being swaddled in the traditional Anatolian

The Grocer and The Chief : A Parable ( 39 )

fashion-for three months a solid mudpack on the body tinder the
swaddling cloths, thereafter for three months a mudless swaddle.
(Geoffrey Gorer’s association of Russian swaddling with ochi
chomya seemed due for an Anatolian confirmation, since Turkish
eyes are every bit as lustrous black as Slavic eyes.) I glanced up
at the large clock on the wall, which had stood firmly at 11:09
since I first entered the room at 9:16 the preceding day. It was
clearly intended only as an emblem of social standing. In the
very household where swaddling continued, possibly the first
clock in Balgat (as once the first radio) had won a place. And
though the clock was only decorative rather than useful, yet the
hourglass was no longer visible. Times had changed. The Chief
noticed my glance and suggested that we could now go out to see
the shops of his sons.

We went first to the elder son’s grocery store, just across the
road and alongside the village “fountain,” where Balgat women
did the family wash as in ages past (though this would pass when
the new municipal water supply became available at reasonable
rates). The central floor space was set out with merchandise in
the immemorial manner— heavy, rough, anonymous hemp sacks
each laden with a commodity requiring no identity card, groats
in one and barley in another, here lentils and there chicory.
But beyond the sacks was a distinct innovation, a counter. What
is more, die counter turned a comer and ran parallel to two
sides of the square hut. Built into it was a cash drawer and above
each surface a hygienic white porcelain fixture for fluorescent light-
ing. Along the walls was the crowning glory— rows of shelves
running from "top to floor and side to side, and on them standing
myriads of round boxes, clean and all the same, dressed like
soldiers in a great parade.” The Grocer’s words of aspiration
came leaping back as I looked admiringly around the store. His
dream-house had been built in Balgat— in less time than even he
might have forecast— and by none other than the Chief!

The irony of the route by which Balgat had entered history
accompanied us as we walked in quartet, the Chief and I ahead,
the sons behind, to the clothing store of the younger son. This
was in die newer part of the village, just across the new road
from die bus station.” The entrance to the store was freshly
painted dark blue, a color imbued by Muslim lore with power
to ward off the evil eye. The stock inside consisted mainly of

(40) Perspectives

dungarees, levis, coveralls (looking rather like U.S. Army surplus
stocks). There was a continuous and growing demand for these
goods, the Chief stated solemnly, as more and more Balgati went
into the labor market of Ankara, first discarding their sholvars
(the billowing knickers of traditional garb in which Western car-
toons always still portray the “sultan” in a harem scene). In a
comer of the store there was also a small stock of “gentleman’s
haberdashery”— ready-made suits, shirts, even a rack of neckties.

The younger son, who maintained under his smile of proprietary
pleasure a steady silence in the presence of the Chief, replied to
a direct question from me that he had as yet sold very few items
from this department of the store. One suit had gone to a pros-
pective bridegroom, but the Balgat males by and large were still
reticent about wearing store-bought clothes. A few, indeed, had
purchased in a sub rosa sort of way neckties which remained
to be exhibited in public. But wearing them would come, now
that several owned them, as soon as an older man was bold
enough to wear his first. The owners of the neckties had only
to get used to them in private, looking at them now and then,
showing them to their wives and elder sons, and some one of
them had to show the way. I remembered Tosuns rather nasty
comment about the Grocer: "He even wore some sort of a neck-
tie .” As one saw it now, the Grocer had shown the way, and it
was now only a hop, skip and jump through history to the point
where most men of Balgat would be wearing neckties.

The Grocers memory stayed with me all that afternoon, after
I had expressed intense satisfaction with the shops, wished the
sons good fortune, thanked the Chief again and, with his per-
mission, started out to walk among the alleys and houses of
Balgat. On the way, I absently counted 69 radio antennas on the
roofs and decided that yesterday’s estimate of “over 100” was
probably reliable. And only four years ago, I counterpointed to
myself, there was but a single battery set in this village. The same
theme ran through my recollection of the numbers of tractors, re-
frigerators, and “unfarming persons.” Several of these newly un-
farming persons, recognizing their interlocutor of yesterday’s coffee-
house session, greeted me as I strolled along. One stopped me
long enough to deliver his opinion of the Turkish-Pakistani pact
(strong affirmation) and to solicit mine of the proposed law to

The Grocer and The Chief: A Parable ( 41 )

give Americans prospecting rights on Turkish oil (qualified af-
firmative).

Weary of walking, I turned back to the coffee-house. The cere-
mony of welcome was warm and the coffee was again on the
house. But the conversational group was smaller, this being a
workday. Only eleven Balgati appeared to praise the weather and
hear my questions. The group got off on politics, with some atten-
tion to the general theory of power but more intense interest in
hearing each other’s predictions of the margin by which the 'Demo-
brat party would win the elections next month. There was also
general agreement, at least among the older men, that it would
be better to have a small margin between the major parties. When
the parties are competing and need our votes, then they heed
our voices— thus ran the underlying proposition of the colloquy.
“The villagers have learned the basic lesson of democratic poli-
tics,” I wrote in my notebook.

The afternoon was about over before I got an appropriate
occasion to ask about the Grocer. It came when the talk returned
to the villagers’ favorite topic of how much better life had become
during the past four years of Demokrat rule. Again they illustrated
the matter by enumerating the new shops in Balgat and the things
they had to sell that many people could buy. There was even a
new barber shop, opened last month by the son of the late Altemur
after going for some time to Ankara as apprentice. “How are these
new grocery shops better than the old grocery shop of years ago
owned by the fat grocer who is now dead?” I asked. The line of
response was obvious in advance, but the question served to
lead to another: What sort of man had the Grocer been?

The answers were perfunctory, consisting mainly of pro forma
expressions of goodwill toward the departed. I tried to get back
of these ritual references by indirection. How had the Grocer
dressed? Why had he been so interested in the life of Ankara?
The light finally shone in one of the wiser heads and he spoke
the words I was seeking:

Ah, he was the cleverest of us all. We did not know it then, but
he saw better than all what lay in tire path ahead. We have none like
tlu's among us now. He was a prophet.

As I look back on it now, my revisit to Balgat ended then. I

(42) Perspectives

went back several times, once with gifts for the Chiefs grand-
children, another time with my camera (as he had coyly sug-
gested) to take his picture. On these visits I felt less tense, asked
fewer questions, than during the earlier visits. The last time I
went out with the publisher of a prominent Istanbul newspaper
(“The New York Times of Turkey”), a dedicated Demokrat man,
who was eager to see the transformed village I had described to
him. He was enchanted with the Chief, the stores, the bus service
and electricity and other symbols of the history into which his
party had ushered Balgat. He decided to write a feature story
about it and asked permission to call it “Professor Lemer’s Vil-
lage.” I declined, less from modesty than a sense of anachronism.
The Balgat his party needed was the suburb inhabited by the
sons of the Chief, with their swaddled children and their proud
new clock, their male “comers” and their retail stores, their fili-
opietistic silence and their movies that teach excitement. The
ancient village I had known for what now seemed only four short
years was passing, had passed. The Grocer was dead. The Chief
—“the last Muhtar of Balgat”— had reincarnated the Grocer in the
flesh of his sons. Tosun was in North Africa studying the Berbers.

II.

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory

“I am thankful that the good God created us all
ignorant, I am glad that when we change His plans
in this regard we have to do it at our own risk."

—Mark Twain

“The United States is presiding at a general re-
organization of the ways of living throughout the
entire world.”

— Andr6 Siegfried

THE PASSING OF BALGAT is but an instance of the
passing of traditional society in the Middle East. The modern-
izing of ancient lifeways involves many Tosuns and shepherds,
many grocers and chiefs, many sons of chiefs. For the stakes of
modernization, as Mark Twain suggests, are deep and personal.
Secular enlightenment does not easily replace sacred revelation
in the guidance of human affairs. Sacred codes, once revealed and
transmitted through the shepherd, provide simple rules of conduct
for all the flock— who can remain ignorant or, more profoundly,
innocent. But secular enlightenment each man must get for him-
self. Many individuals must struggle through the loss of ignorance-
as-bliss in the making of a new secular “climate of opinion,”
Western men need only reflect on the titanic struggles whereby,
over the course of centuries, medieval lifeways were supplanted
by modernity. Hindsight now summarizes these struggles as The
Age of Exploration, The Renaissance, The Reformation, The
Counter-Reformation, The Industrial Revolution. But well we know
that this historical sequence worked itself out through millions of
individual lives; that many suffered, others prospered, while their
world was being reshaped in the modem image. In die end— and
the end is not yet— all men of the West had acquired a new style
of life.

( 43 )

( 44 ) Perspectives

A similar process is under way in the Middle East. The under-
lying tensions are everywhere much the same— village verm
town, land versus cash, illiteracy versus enlightenment, resignation
versus ambition, piety versus excitement. But the process reaches
people in different settings and induces different dilemmas of per-
sonal choice. In Turkey a grocer exhilarated by the sight of a city
must live out his life in a traditional village; in Iran a newly
entrepreneurial peasant proudly owns the first store-bought suit
in his walled hamlet but rarely dares to wear it among his envious
fellows; in Jordan an illiterate Beduin chieftain professes the tribal
law of the desert but plans to send his son abroad to school; in
Lebanon an educated Muslim girl loves the movies but fears her
orthodox parents; in Syria an under-educated, over-ambitious clerk
dreams of being a Tito; in Egypt a young engineer has eaten pork
in the West and seeks atonement in the Muslim Brotherhood. To
locate these diverse figures in the modernizing Middle East is our
aim. The parable of Balgat conveys some sense of the varied ques-
tions and answers, pleasures and pains, which modernization brings
into the lives of people so variously situated. But Balgat is a minia-
ture; what we need is a landscape.

Landscaping requires some principle of unity in diversity. The
source of Middle East unity is a thorny problem of scholarship,
complicated by the recent efforts of ideologues to impose a defini-
tion that will be politically usable rather than historically valid.
Scholars seem agreed that the current ideologies tend to obscure
and evade some real issues. The people of the area today are uni-
fied not by their common solutions but by their common problems:
how to modernize traditional lifeways that no longer “work” to
their own satisfaction. Some seek salvation in past pieties— the re-
course to Islamic solidarity providing in this sense a parallel to
the Crusades, which, in the name of orthodoxy, hastened the pass-
ing of medievalism and coming of modernity in the West. But,
underlying the ideologies, there pervades the Middle East a sense
that the old ways must go because they no longer satisfy the new
wants. A world conference of leading Islamists recently concluded:

. The disorder and poverty which rage in the Middle East . . . seem
incapable of being remedied except by a greater solidarity among Islamic
countries and by a general modernization of these countries. But though
m ermzahon is a tangible fact, only the pace of which might require

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 45 )

control and acceleration, Muslim solidarity is only a fleeting, variable,
uncertain supposition. 1

Modernization, then, is the unifying principle in this study of
the varied Middle East. The term is imposed by recent history.
Earlier one spoke of Europeanization, to denote the common ele-
ments underlying French influence in Syria-Lebanon and British
influence in Egypt and Jordan. More recently, following a century
of educational and missionary activity, Americanization became a
specific force and the common stimuli of the Atlantic civilization
came to be called Westernization. Since World War II, the con-
tinuing search for new ways has been coupled with repudiation of
the Western aegis. Soviet and other modernizing models, as illus-
trated by India and Turkey, have become visible in the area. Any
label that today localizes the process is bound to be parochial. For
Middle Easterners more than ever want the modem package, but
reject the label “made in U.S.A.” (or, for that matter, "made in
USSR”). We speak, nowadays, of modernization.

Whether from East or West, modernization poses the same
basic challenge— the infusion of "a rationalist and positivist spirit”
against which, scholars seem agreed, “Islam is absolutely defense-
less.” 2 The phasing and modality of the process have changed,
however, in the past decade. Where Europeanization once pene-
trated only the upper level of Middle East society, affecting mainly
leisure-class fashions, modernization today diffuses among a wider
population and touches public institutions as well as private aspira-
tions with its disquieting “positivist spirit.” Central to this change
is the shift in modes of communicating ideas and attitudes— for
spreading among a large public vivid images of its own New Ways
is what modernization distinctly does. Not the class media of books
and travel, but die mass media of tabloids, radio and movies, are
now the dominant modes. Today’s Middle East “chaos” is largely
due to the shift of modernist inspiration from the discreet discourse
of a few in Oxford colleges and Paris salons to the broadcast ex-
hortations among the multitudes by the mass media.

This historic shift stimulated the inquiry begun in 1950, of
which tliis book is the outcome. The role of new messages in the
Middle East ‘transition" raised a breviary of empirical questions:
who was changing? from what to what? how fast? with what ef-
fects? While the great debate over Permanence versus Change
often obliges the Middle Easterner to declare himself philosophi-

( 46 ) Perspectives

cally on such questions, we investigate them here in a more limited
sense. We focus on the personal meaning of social change-the
transformations worked into the daily lifeways of individuals by
these large historical forces.

That some millions of Turks now live in towns, work in shops,
wear trousers and have opinions who, a generation ago, lived in
the centuries-old sholvars symbolizing the agrarian, illiterate, isolate
life of the Anatolian village is what modernization has already
done to some people. That other millions throughout the Middle
East are yearning to trade in their old lives for such newer ways
is what modernization promises to most people. The rapid spread
of these new desires, which provide tire dynamic power of mod-
ernization, is most clearly perceived in the coming of the mass
media. To see why this is so— to comprehend what the Middle
Eastern peoples are experiencing under the title of modernization
—we remind ourselves of what, historically, happened in the West
For the sequence of current events in the Middle East can be
understood as a deviation, in some measure a deliberate deforma-
tion, of the Western model.

This observational standpoint implies no ethnocentrism. As we
shall show, the Western model of modernization exhibits certain
components and sequences whose relevance is global. Everywhere,
for example, increasing urbanization has tended to raise literacy;
rising literacy has tended to increase media exposure; increasing
media exposure has “gone with” wider economic participation (per
capita income) and political participation (voting). The model
evolved in the West is an historical fact. That the same basic model
reappears in virtually all modernizing societies on all continents of
the world, regardless of variations in race, color, creed, will be
shown in this chapter. The point is that the secular process of
social change, which brought modernization to the Western world,
has more than antiquarian relevance to todays problems of the
Middle East transition. Indeed, the lesson is that Middle Eastern
modernizers will do well to study the historical sequence of West-
ern growth.

Taking the Western model of modernization as a baseline is
forced upon us, moreover, by the tacit assumptions and proclaimed
goals which prevail among Middle East spokesmen. That some of
these leaders, when convenient for diplomatic maneuver, denounce
the West is politically important and explains why we have chosen

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 47 )

to speak of “modernization” rather than “Westernization.” Rather
more important, Western society still provides the most developed
model of societal attributes (power, wealth, skill, rationality) which
Middle East spokesmen continue to advocate as their own goal.
Their own declared policies and programs set our criteria of
modernization. From the West came the stimuli which undermined
traditional society in the Middle East; for reconstruction of a
modem society that will operate efficiently in the world today, the
West is still a useful model. What the West is, in this sense, the
Middle East seeks to become.

But these sodeties-in-a-huny have little patience with the his-
torical pace of Western development; what happened in the West
over centuries, some Middle Easterners now seek to accomplish
in years. Moreover, they want to do it their “own way.” A compli-
cation of Middle East modernization is its own ethnocentrism—
expressed politically in extreme nationalism, psychologically in
passionate xenophobia. The hatred sown by anticolonialism is har-
vested in the rejection of every appearance of foreign tutelage.
Wanted are modem institutions but not modem ideologies, modem
power but not modem purposes, modem wealth but not modem
wisdom, modem commodities but not modem cant. It is not clear,
however, that modem ways and words can be so easily and so
totally sundered. Underlying the variant ideological forms which
modernization took in Europe, America, Russia, there have been
certain behavioral and institutional compulsions common to all.
These historical regularities some Middle East leaders now seek
to obviate, trying instead new routes and risky by-passes. We alert
ourselves to the novelty of these efforts by recapitulating briefly
some essential elements in the modernization of the West.

1. The Mobile Personality: Empathy

People in the Western culture have become habituated to the
sense of change and attuned to its various rhythms. Many genera-
tions ago, in the West, ordinary men found themselves unbound
from their native soil and relatively free to move. Once they ac-
tually moved in large numbers, from farms to flats and from fields
to factories, they became intimate with the idea of change by direct
experience . 3 This bore little resemblance to the migrant or cru-
sading hordes of yore, driven by war or famine. This was move-

(48) Perspectives

ment by individuals, each having made a personal choice to seek
elsewhere his own version of a better life.

Physical mobility so experienced naturally entrained social
mobility, and gradually there grew institutions appropriate to the
process. Those who gained heavily by changing their address soon
wanted a convenient bank in the neighborhood to secure their
treasure; also a law-and-police force to guard the neighborhood
against disorder and devaluation; also a voice in prescribing stand-
ards of behavior for others . 4 So came into operation a “system”
of bourgeois values that embraced social change as normal. Rules
of the game had to be worked out for adjudicating conflicts over
the direction and rate of change. Who was to gain, how, and how
much? As the profits to be gained from mobility became evident
to all, conflicts over access to the channels of opportunity became
sharper. The process can be traced through the evolution of West-
ern property and tax laws, whose major tendency is to protect the
“haves” without disqualifying the “have-nots .” 5 It was by protecting
every man’s opportunity to gain that the modem West turned
decisively in the direction of social mobility.

Social institutions founded on voluntary participation by mobile
individuals required a new array of skills and a new test of merit.
Every person, according to the new democratic theory, was equally
entitled to acquire the skills needed for shaping his own “future”
in the Great Society. The vigorous controversy over public educa-
tion that agitated the eighteenth century produced a net affirma-
tion of equal opportunity. In every Western country the verdict
was pronounced that education should be freely available to all
who wanted it, and in some countries whether they wanted it or
not. Thus the idea spread that personal mobility is itself a first-
order value; the sense grew that social morality is essentially the
ethics of social change. A man is what he may become; a society
is its potential. These notions passed out of die realm of debate
into the Western law and mores.

A mobile society has to encourage rationality, for the calculus
of choice shapes individual behavior and conditions its rewards.
People come to see the social future as manipulable rather than
ordained and their personal prospects in terms of achievement
rather than heritage. Rationality is puiposive: ways of thinking
and acting are instruments of intention (not articles of faith); men
succeed or fail by the test of what they accomplish (not what they

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 49 )

worship). So, whereas traditional man tended to reject innovation
by saying “It has never been thus,” tbe contemporary Westerner
is more likely to ask “Does it work?” and try the new way without
further ado.

The psychic gap between these two postures is vast. It took
much interweaving through time, between ways of doing and ways
of thinking, before men could work out a style of daily living with
change that felt consistent and seamless. The experience of mobility
through successive generations gradually evolved participant life-
ways which feel “normal” today. Indeed, while past centuries es-
tablished die public practices of the mobile society, it has been
die work of the twentieth century to diffuse widely a mobile sen-
sibility so adaptive to change that rearrangement of the self-system
is its distinctive mode.

The mobile personality can be described in objective and tech-
nical fashion. Since this is what the book is largely about, it will
do here to define its main feature and to suggest the main line of
its secular evolution. The mobile person is distinguished by a high
capacity for identification with new aspects of his environment;
he comes equipped with the mechanisms needed to incorporate
new demands upon himself that arise outside of his habitual expe-
rience. These mechanisms for enlarging a mans identity operate
in two ways. Projection facilitates identification by assigning to
the object certain preferred attributes of the self— others are “in-
corporated” because diey are like me. (Distantiation or negative
identification, in the Freudian sense, results when one projects
onto others certain disliked attributes of the self.) Introjection
enlarges identity by attributing to the self certain desirable at-
tributes of the object— others are “incorporated” because I am like
them or want to be like them. We shall use the word empathy as
shorthand for both these mechanisms. This condensation of psycho-
analytic terminology has a pragmatic, not theoretic, intent— since
our materials are simply not amenable to the more highly differ-
entiated categories of Freudian vocabulary. Our interview data
does not permit systematic discrimination between the introjective
and projective mechanisms. Nor does empathy denote sympathy
or antipathy. In particular cases it may lead to either— “under-
standing may breed dislike as well as affection.

We are interested in empathy as the inner mechanism which
enables newly mobile persons to operate efficiently in a changing

( 50 ) Perspectives

world. Empathy, to simplify the matter, is the capacity to see
oneself in the other fellow’s situation. This is an indispensable
skill for people moving out of traditional settings. Ability to empa-
thize may make all the difference, for example, when the newly
mobile persons are villagers who grew up knowing all the extant
individuals, roles and relationships in their environment. Outside
his village or tribe, each must meet new individuals, recognize
new roles, and learn new relationships involving himself. A rich
literature of humor and pathos once dealt with the adventures of
the country bumpkin in the Big City, the bewildered immigrant in
a strange land. They had to learn their way in these new settings.
Learn, in swelling numbers, they did. The story of the 19th century
West includes this learning, which now enters the story of the
20th century East. Accordingly, we are interested in the mobile
personality mainly as a social phenomenon with a history. Our
concern is with the large historical movement, now becoming visible
in the Middle East, of which an enlarged capacity for empathy is
the distinctive psychic component. Our interest is to clarify the
process whereby the high empathizer tends to become also the
cash customer, the radio listener, the voter. 6

It is a major hypothesis of this study that high empathic capac-
ity is the predominant personal style only in modem society, which
is distinctively industrial, urban, literate and participant. Tradi-
tional society is nonparticipant— it deploys people by kinship into
communities isolated from each other and from a center; without
an urban-rural division of labor, it develops few needs requiring
economic interdependence; lacking the bonds of interdependence,
peoples horizons are limited by locale and their decisions involve
only other known people in known situations. Hence, there is no
need for a transpersonal common doctrine formulated in terms of
shared secondary symbols-a national “ideology” which enables
persons unknown to each other to engage in political controversy
or achieve "consensus" by comparing their opinions. Modem society
is participant in that it functions by “consensus”— individuals mak-
ing personal decisions on public issues must concur often enough
with other individuals they do not know to make possible a stable
common governance. Among the marks of this historic achievement
in social organization, which we call Participant Society, are that
most people go through school, read newspapers, receive cash pay-
ments in jobs they are legally f ree to change, buy goods for cash

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 51 )

in an open market, vote in elections which actually decide among
competing candidates, and express opinions on many matters which
are not their personal business.

Especially important, for the Participant Style, is the enormous
proportion of people who are expected to “have opinions on public
matters-and the corollary expectation of these people that their
opinions will matter. It is this subtly complicated structure of re-
ciprocal expectation which sustains widespread empathy. Only
in the lowest reaches of America’s social hierarchy, for example, is
it still discussed whether people ought to have opinions. In a
climactic scene of Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck relates how the
Madam of a whorehouse prepares one of her hustlers, not really
made for the business, to go out into the world of respectability.
The first rule is to keep her mouth shut:

Next tiling is opinions. You and me is always busting out with
opinions. Hell, Suzy, we ain’t got no opinions! We just say stuff we
heard or seen in the movies. We’re scared stiff we’ll miss something,
like running for a bus. That’s the second rule: lay off opinions because
you ain’t really got any.

As Suzy moves from the anarchic margins of American life into
solid citizenry, it is foreseen, she will learn to have opinions along
the way. In the Middle East many more people have a much
longer way to go. “How can you ask me such a question?” gasped
the Balgat shepherd. His gasp resounded often in our interviews
around the Middle East.

For, in any society, only when the accepted model of behavior
is emulated by the population at large does it become the pre-
dominant personal style. The model of behavior developed by
modem society is characterized by empathy, a high capacity for
rearranging the self-system on short notice. Whereas the isolate
communities of traditional society functioned well on the basis
of a highly constrictive personality, the interdependent sectors of
modem society require widespread participation. This in turn
requires an expansive and adaptive self-system, ready to incor-
porate new roles and to identify personal values with public issues.
This is why modernization of any society has involved the great
characterological transformation we call psychic mobility. The
latent statistical assertion involved here is this: In modem society
more individuals exhibit higher empathic capacity than in anv
previous society. }

( 52 ) Perspectives

As history has not been written in these terms, we were obliged
to organize our own forays into historical data to establish a trace-
line on the evolution of the participant society and the mobile
personality. We restrain our account of these forays to some main
lines which lead directly to the problem in hand.

2. The Mobility Multiplier: Mass Media

The historic increase of psychic mobility begins with the ex-
pansion of physical travel. Historians conventionally date the mod-
em era from the Age of Exploration. Every Western schoolboy
knows the names of Cabot, Columbus, Cortez and is dimly aware
that they “opened new worlds.” This was an initial phase in the mod-
em expansion of human communication. Gradually the technical
means of transporting live bodies improved and physical displace-
ment became an experience lived through by millions of plain folk
earlier bounden to some ancestral spot. Geographical mobility be-
came, in this phase, the usual vehicle of social mobility. It remained
for a later time to make vivid that each mobile soma of the earlier
epoch housed a psyche, and to reconstruct transatlantic history in
terms of psychic mobility. It is the contemporary historian who
now distinctively perceives the mass immigration into America as
a traumatic process of psychic encounter with the new and strange . 7
We accent the contemporaneity of the psychic dimension, because
the moral injunction to ‘look shining at new styles of architecture
is something new in the world . 8

The expansion of psychic mobility means that more people
now command greater skill in imagining themselves as strange
persons in strange situations, places and times than did people
in any previous historical epoch. In our time, indeed, the spread
of empathy around the world is accelerating. The earlier increase
of physical experience through transportation has been multiplied
by the spread of mediated experience through mass communication.
A generation before Columbus sailed to the New World, Gutenberg
activated his printing press. The technical history of the popular
arts suggests the sequence. The typical literary form of the modern
epoch, the novel, is a conveyance of disciplined empathy. Where
e poet once specialized in self-expression, the modem novelist
reports his sustained imagination of the lives of others . 9 The process

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 53 )

is carried further in the movies and in radio-television dramas.
These have peopled the daily world of their audience with sus-
tained, even intimate, experience of the lives of others. “Ma
Perkins,” “The Goldbergs,” “I Love Lucy”— all these bring us friends
we never met, but whose joys and sorrows we intensely “share.”
The media create for us what has aptly been called "the world of
the daytime serial .” 10

Radio, film and television climax the evolution set into motion
by Gutenberg. The mass media opened to the large masses of man-
kind the infinite vicarious universe. Many more millions of persons
in the world were to be affected directly, and perhaps more pro-
foundly, by the communication media than by the transportation
agencies. By obviating the physical displacement of travel, the
media accented the psychic displacement of vicarious experience.
For the imaginary universe not only involves more people, but it
involves them in a different order of experience. There is a world
of difference, we know, between “armchair travel” and actually
“being there.” What is the difference?

Physical experience of a new environment affronts the sensibility
with new perceptions in their complex “natural” setting. The
traveler in a strange land perceives simultaneously climate and
clothing, body builds and skin textures, gait and speech, feeding
and hygiene, work and play— in short, the ensemble of manners
and morals that make a “way of life.” A usual consequence for the
traveler is that the “pattern of culture” among the strangers be-
comes confused, diverging from his prior stereotype of it and from
his preferred model of reality.

Vicarious experience occurs in quite different conditions. Instead
of tire complexities that attend a “natural” environment, mediated
experience exhibits the simplicity of “artificial” settings contrived
by the creative communicator. Thus, while the traveler is apt to
ecome bewildered by the profusion of strange sights and sounds,
ie receiver of communications is likely to be enjoying a composed
an orchestrated version of the new reality. He has the benefit of
more acile perception of the new experience as a “whole,” with
e concomitant advantage (which is sometimes illusory) of facile
comprehension. The stimuli of perception, which shape under-
standing, have been simplified.

The simplification of stimuli, however, is accomplished at a
certain cost The displaced traveler’s great pragmatic advantage

( 54 ) Perspectives

is that he must take responsive action toward the stimuli presented
by the new environment. However painful this may be-as when,
to take a simple case, he has lost his way and must ask directions
in a language of which his mastery is uncertain— overt action does
help to discharge the traveler’s interior tensions. But the passive
audience for mediated communications has no such discharge
channel; the radio-listener’s personal response to new stimuli re-
mains confined to his own interior. The inhibition of overt active
response is a learned behavior and a difficult one. It was common,
in the early days of movies, for persons strained beyond endurance
to throw themselves or some object at the screen to stop the villain
from strangling the heroine. Even the old media hands among
the youngsters of today will sometimes, at a particularly agonizing
moment in the television show, hide their faces.

Thus die mass media, by simplifying perception (what we
“see”) while greatly complicating response (what we “do"), have
been great teachers of interior manipulation. They disciplined
Western man in those empathic skills which spell modernity. They
also portrayed for him die roles he might confront and elucidated
the opinions he might need. Their continuing spread in our century
is performing a similar function on a world scale. The Middle East
already shows the marks of this historic encounter. As a young
bureaucrat in Iran put it: “The movies are like a teacher to us, who
tells us what to do and what not.” The global network of mass
media has already recruited enough new participants in all comers
of the earth to make “the opinions of mankind” a real factor instead
of a fine phrase in the arena of world politics. There now exists, and
its scope accelerates at an extraordinary pace, a genuine world
public opinion.” This has happened because millions of people, who
never left their native heath, now are learning to imagine how life
is organized in different lands and under different codes than then-
own. That this signifies a net increase in human imaginativeness,
so construed, is the proposition under consideration.

3. The “System” of Modernity 0

A second proposition of this large historical order derives from

i( Eor a fuller discussion of the material in this section, see my P a P® r
Communication Systems and Social Systems: A Statistical Exploration in
History and Policy,” Behavioral Science II (October 1957), pp. 266-275.

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory (55)

the observation that modern media systems have flourished only
in societies that are modern by other tests. That is, the media
spread psychic mobility most efficiently among peoples who have
achieved in some measure the antecedent conditions of geographic
and social mobility. The converse of this proposition is also true:
no modem society functions efficiently without a developed system
of mass media. Our historical forays indicate that the conditions
which define modernity form an interlocking “system.” They grow
conjointly, in the normal situation, or they become stunted severally.

It seems clear that people who live together in a common polity
will develop patterned ways of distributing information along with
other commodities. It is less obvious that these information flows
will interact with the distribution of power, wealth, status at so
many points as to form a system— and, moreover, a system so
tightly interwoven that institutional variation in one sector will
be accompanied by regular and determinate variation in the other
sectors. Yet, just this degree of interaction between communication
and social systems is what our historical exploration suggests.

We differentiated two historical systems of public communica-
tion, Oral and Media, according to the paradigm: Who says what
to whom and how? On these four variables of source, content,
audience, channel the ideal types differ as follows:

Media Systemt

Oral Syllemr

Channel

Broadcast (mediated)

Personal (face-to-fae

Audience

Heterogeneous (mass)

Primary (groups)

Content

Descriptive (news)

Prescriptive (rules)

Source

Professional (skill)

Hierarchical (status)

In media systems, the main flow of public information is operated
by a corps of professional communicators, selected according to
skill criteria, whose job it is to transmit mainly descriptive mes-
sages ("news”) through impersonal media (print, radio, film) to
relatively undifferentiated mass audiences. In oral systems, public
information usually emanates from sources authorized to speak
by their place in the social hierarchy, i.e., by status rather than
skill criteria. Its contents are typically prescriptive rather than
descriptive; news is less salient than “rules” which specify correct
behavior toward imminent events directly involving the larger
population, such as tax collections and labor drafts. (Oral and
media systems also differ sharply in recreational content, as we

( 50 ) Perspectives

shall see, but we here focus on informational content.) Even these
prescriptive messages are normally transmitted via faee-to-face
oral channels (or via such point-to-point equivalents as letters)
to the primary groups of kinship, worship, work and play.

Naturally, few societies in the world today give a perfect fit to
either of these idealized sets of paired comparisons. America closely
approximates the model of a media system, but people also speak
to each other on public issues and the personal influence of the
“opinion leader” is strong . 11 Conversely, Saudi Arabia corresponds
to the oral system but operates its radio transmitters at Jidda.®
As we move around the world, subjecting our ideal types to
empirical data, various elements in the patterns begin to shift.
Most countries are in some phase of transition from one system
to the other.

But two observations appear to hold for all countries, regardless
of 'continent, culture, or creed. First the direction of change is
always from oral to media system (no known case exhibiting change
in the reverse direction). Secondly, the degree of change toward
media system appears to correlate significantly with changes in
other key sectors of the social system. If these observations are
correct, then we are dealing with a “secular trend” of social change
that is global in scope. What we have been calling the Western
model of modernization is operating on a global scale. Moreover,
since this means that other important changes must regularly ac-
company the development of a media system, there is some point in
the frequent references to a “world communication revolution.
We here consider the more moderate proposition that a communi-
cation system is both index and agent of change in a total social
system. This avoids the genetic problem of causality, about which
we can only speculate, in order to stress correlational hypotheses
which can be tested. On this view, once the modernizing process
is started, chicken and egg in fact “cause” each other to develop.

To formulate the hypothesis in a manner suitable for testing,
we selected indices of three principal sectors— socioeconomic, cul-
tural, political— which could be compared in oral systems and
media systems. The "profiles” were as follows:

a cinta 6 u however, t ^ iat ^ lese State-owned transmitters produce but

a single broadcast daily. See UNESCO, World Communication (1956), p. ^

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory

(57)

Sector

Socioeconomic

Cultural

Political

Media Systems
urbon
literate
electoral

Oral Systems
rural
illiterate
designalive

To sharpen the differences, these profiles are stated in dichotomous
fashion. The dogmatic appearance of this formulation should trouble
no one, for we test them empirically as continuous variables on
which differences are calibrated. Just as there is no perfect media
system so there is no perfectly urban, literate, electoral society.
Our model is probabilistic, our measures are distributive, and our
test of fit is correlational.

Our procedure was to construct a matrix containing data on
urbanization, literacy, voting and media participation. We handled
these as indices of public participation in the four “sectors” as a
whole, by expressing our data as the proportion of total popula-
tion possessing each attribute. Thus, we defined urbanization as
the proportion living in cities over 50,000; literacy as the propor-
tion able to read in one language; media participation as the pro-
portion buying newspapers, owning radios, and attending cinemas
(all three items being integrated into a single index number);
electoral participation as the proportion actually voting in national
elections (obtained by averaging results for the five most recent
elections). Participation in these four sectors, so defined, was taken
to represent participation in the social system as a whole. Recall
that the participant style of modem society, as contrasted with
the isolate lifeways of traditional society, hinges on the frequency
of participation by individuals.

In die next chapter, and in die case studies, we shall examine
more closely the quality of participation by different types of
individuals in different countries. Here we wish to compare exist-
ing nations in terms of overall participation in the sectors essential
for modernization. This requires a simple frequency measure, which
we obtained from UNESCO and other UN data on most countries
of die world— ranging from 54 to 73 in number on the different
indices. 0

° The statistics were used as reported in UNESCO World Communica-
tion (1951). These were checked against other UNESCO sources for typo-
graphical errors and against the UN Statistical Yearbook and Demographic
Yearbook for errors of information and computation. Wherever significant
diilerences appeared which could not be reconciled, the case was excluded

{ 58 ) Perspectives

Simple correlation by pairs showed that each factor in the set
was significantly related to each other factor. 0 In the present case,
it was “statistically significant” that literacy correlated with urban-
ism at .64, with voting at .80, and with media participation at
.82. Each of these correlations was investigated further, with gen-
erally confirmatory results, as when literacy was correlated with
each item in the media participation index:

Madia Participation Items

Correlation with llloracy

Daily newspaper circulation

75

Number of radio receivers

.74

Cinema seating capacity

.61

It is obvious that newspaper circulation should correlate better
with literacy than does movie attendance, the enjoyment of which
does not require literacy. The high correlation of radio receivers
leads, for explanation, in another direction. Whereas building
cinemas (in which imported feature fi lm s are shown) requires
no modem technolog}'’, the mass production of radio receivers
does require a fairly high level of industrialization.

We subsume industrialization under our index of urbanization.
This is a key variable in our “system,” for it is with urbanization
that the modernizing process historically has begun in Western
societies. Our next task, having shown that literacy and media
participation are highly correlated, was to establish their inter-
dependence with urbanism. For tire historical literature on tins
point, while allocating great influence to the growth of cities, is not
clear on several important questions: if urbanization is a necessary
condition of modernization (meaning that certain other changes
can occur only in cities), then what are these other changes that

from our analysis. Otherwise all ‘‘self-governing territories” are included. Tire
writer is unable to offer any definitive evaluation of these XJN data which
are assembled from reports prepared separately by each nation. There are
national differences in definition of indices and accuracy of reporting. Whereas
magnitudes of “error” cannot be checked systematically, the direction of
error, in those cases I have checked, always tend toward overstating ones
progress in modernization — i.e., underdeveloped countries are likely to report
larger rather than smaller estimates of urbanization, literacy, voting, etc.

° Correlation is a statistical procedure to determine whether independent
scries of events, when their joint occurrence is enumerated, turn out to
have occurred together more often than would happen simply by chance-
and, if so, how much more often. Readers desiring elucidation of other sta-

Mir usad in tIiese P a S es ray refer to the index of W. A. Wallis and

w. \. Roberts, Statistics. A New Approach (1956).

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 59 )

regularly occurred in any society when urbanization occurred? If
urbanization is necessary to start modernization, how much of it
is necessary (what is the “critical minimum”)? Is there a point
at which modernization, once started, can sustain itself without
much or any further urbanization (is there a “critical optimum” for
urbanization)?

We formulated these questions, for testing, in three specific
hypotheses: (I) that critical limits, minimum and optimum, can
be established for urbanization within which literacy will increase
directly as urban population grows in all countries; (2) that coun-
tries which have not reached the minimum limit of urbanization
will also be predominantly illiterate; (3) that countries which have
exceeded the optimum limit of urbanization will also be pred-
dominantly literate. To test these hypotheses, we classified all 73
countries according to the data on literacy provided by UNESCO.
We then found the mean urbanization for all the countries in
each literacy group, as reported below.

Countries IN— 73)

Literacy

Urbanization

22

Over 80%

28.0%

4

61-80

29.2

12

41-60

25.0

13

21-40

17.0

22

Under 20

7.4

Thus in all 22 countries less than 20% literate the mean pro-
portion of population living in cities over 50,000 is only 7 . 4 %. The
“critical minimum” of urbanization appears to be between 7-17%
of total population, for convenience one may say 10%. Only after
a country reaches 10% of urbanization does its literacy rate begin
to rise significantly. Thereafter urbanization and literacy increase
together in a direct (monotonic) relationship, until they reach
25%, which appears to be the "critical optimum” of urbanization.
Beyond this literacy continues to rise independently of the growth
of cities. The surplus of 1.2% of urbanization in the second row
is either insignificant, with only four countries, or else confirms
the analysis. Between these limits of 10-25%, our findings indicate,
the growth of cities and of literacy are closely interdependent. 0

"These cutting points are somewhat arbitrary, of course, in the sense
that their outcome is partly determined by the statistical input. Had urbaniza-
tion been indexed by cities over 20,000 rather than 50,000 population, for
example, the critical optimum on this continuum might well be located at

(60)

Perspectives

Having now established high pairwise correlations between
urbanization-literacy and literacy-media participation, with critical
optima for joint growth in each pair, we are in a position to suggest
an-interpretation in terms of historical phasing. The secular evolu-
tion of a participant society appears to involve a regular sequence
of three phases. Urbanization comes first, for cities alone have
developed the complex of skills and resources which characterize
the modem industrial economy. Within this urban matrix develop
both of the attributes which distinguish the next two pliases-
literacy and media growth. There is a close reciprocal relationship
between these, for the literate develop the media which in turn
spread literacy. But, historically, literacy performs the key function
in the second phase. The capacity to read, at first acquired by rela-
tively few people, equips them to perform the varied tasks re-
quired in the modernizing society. Not until the third phase, when
the elaborate technology of industrial development is fairly well
advanced, does a society begin to produce newspapers, radio net-
works, and motion pictures on a massive scale. This, in turn, accele-
rates the spread of literacy. Out of this interaction develop those
institutions of participation (e.g., voting) which we find in all
advanced modem societies. For countries in transition today, these
high correlations suggest that literacy and media participation
may be considered as a supply-and-demand reciprocal in a com-
munication market whose locus, at least in its historical inception,
can only be urban.

We shall later examine the idea that a common psychological
mechanism underlies these phases— that it is the more empathic
individuals who respond, in the first place, to the lure of cities,
schools, media. Urban residence, schooling, media exposure then
train and reinforce the empathic predisposition that was already
present. On this view, the modem “style of life” can nowadays be
acquired as a whole by individuals living in modernizing societies.
This interpretation is quite plausible, but it does not clarify what
happens to empathic individuals who are ready and able to mod-
ernize more rapidly and completely than their society permits. A

th l an Cf ” <<An average rate of progress of less than 10% per
JL " not sufficient to keep the number of illiterates in a country from
anartlnf L a ' decennial rate of 25% or more seems to ensure

UNESCO pi UCtJOn ’ n r , the numbcr of illiterates in the total population.
U * Pr °8ress of Literacy in Various Countries (1953), pp. 175, 178.

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 61 )

large and important class of Middle Easterners are in this position
today. Our data on 73 countries, distributed over all the continents
of the earth, indicate that many millions of individuals everywhere
are in the same position. This further suggests that the model of
modernization follows an autonomous historical logic— that each
phase tends to generate the next phase by some mechanism which
operates independently of cultural or doctrinal variations. To un-
derstand the position of those millions who may be caught in some
historical lag today, we look more closely at our three phases.

Tire first phase, then, is urbanization. It is the transfer of popu-
lation from scattered hinterlands to urban centers that stimulates
the needs and provides the conditions needed for “take-off” toward
widespread participation. Only cities require a largely literate pop-
ulation to function properly— for the organization of urban life
assumes enough literacy to read labels, sign checks, ride subways.
A population of illiterates might learn that they are not to smoke
and spit in the subway, or that Express trains run on the local
tracks between 5 and 7 p.m. But trial-and-error can be a wasteful
societal procedure. The primitive social function of literacy, as
of all skills, is to reduce waste of human effort. Its higher function
is to train the skilled labor force with which cities develop the
industrial complex that produces commodities for cash customers,
including newspapers and radios and movies for media consumers.
Cities produce the machine tools of modernization. Accordingly,
increases of urbanization tend in every society to multiply national
increases in literacy and media participation. By drawing people
from their rural communities, cities create the demand for imper-
sonal communication. By promoting literacy and media, cities
supply this demand. Once the basic industrial plant is in operation,
the development of a participant society passes into a subsequent
phase. Wien voluntary urbanization exceeds 25%, thereby assuring
die conditions of modem production, further urbanization no longer
automatically guarantees equivalent increases in consumption. The
need then shifts to modernizing the conditions which govern con-
sumption.

Of this second phase, literacy is both the index and agent. To
spread consumption of urban products beyond the city limits,
literacy is an efficient instrument. The great symbol of this phase
is the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. The mail-order house replaces the
peddler only when enough people can read catalogues and write

( 62 ) Perspectives

letters. In this sense literacy is also the basic skill required for
operation of a media system. Only the literate- produce the media
contents which mainly the literate consume. Hence, once societies
are about 25% urbanized, the highest correlation of media consump-
tion is with literacy. We shall soon describe more fully how literacy
operates as the pivotal agent in the transition to a fully participant
society. Here we wish to suggest that by the time this second phase
gets well under way, a different social system is in operation than
that which governed behavior in a society that was under 10S>
urban and under 40% (roughly, less than half) literate. For, when
most people in a society have become literate, they tend to gener-
ate all sorts of new desires and to develop the means of satisfying
them. y.'7-'7- )*)£

It is this interplay of new desires and satisfactions which char-
acterizes the third phase of modernization, namely media partici-
pation. Once people are equipped to handle the new experiences
produced by mobility (via their move to the city), and to handle
the new experiences conveyed by media (via their literacy), they
now seek the satisfactions which integrate these skills. They dis-
cover, as did The Grocer in Balgat, the tingle of wondering “what
will happen next”— the tingle which sounds the knell of traditional
society, of routinized lifeways in which everyone knew what would
happen next because it had to follow what came before. To satisfy
this new desire requires the personal skill of empathy which, when
spread among large numbers of persons, makes possible the social
institution of media participation. This was the phase in which the
West developed the “penny press,” early symbol of die accelerating
supply and demand for media products, which continues today
with the pocket radio and the portable TV. It is characteristic of
this phase, as the production-consumption reciprocal of media par-
ticipation develops, that economists come to find production of
radio sets a useful index of growth in total industrial production. 12

For, rising media participation tends to raise participation in
all sectors of the social system. In accelerating the spread of
empathy, it also diffuses those other modem demands to which
participant institutions have responded: in the consumers economy
via cash (and credit), in the public forum via opinion, in the rep-
resentative polity via voting. Other studies had already shown high
pairwise correlations between our indices and economic partici-
pation— e.g., around the world literacy correlated at .84 with per

f?- W-2./

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 63 )

capita income and at .87 with industrialization. 13 Accordingly, we
undertook to establish their connection with political participation,
in such fashion as to determine whether the interdependence be-
tween these four participant sectors was genuinely “systemic.”

We did this by multiple correlations of the four indices already
described. This procedure enabled us to rotate each index in the
matrix, thereby obtaining the simultaneous degree of correlation
between it and all three of the other indices. Based on 54 countries
(those reporting data on all four indices), the coefficients obtained
in turn for each dependent variable are reported below.

Dependent Variable
Urbanization
literacy*

Media Participation
Political Participation

Multiple Correlation Coefficient
.61
.91
M
.82

* A notable feature of all literacy correlations was their stability,
reQardless of sample size. The correlation of .82 with media par-
ticipation was for N===54 countries; for N-~'73 countries it was .84.
(Standard deviation wos 31.4.) UNESCO literacy data come grouped
In five categories, each covering 20 percentage points. All other
data were ungrouped.

The size of these coefficients demonstrates that the relationship
between the four sectors is systemic. These independent tests
of the participant style of life do in fact “go together” in 54 extant
societies. Beyond this, their ascending order appears to support the
historical phasing that has been sketched.

That the urbanization coefficient should be lowest is as ex-
pected. Our earlier data indicated that about 102 of the population
must be urbanized before the “take-off” occurs. At this point it
becomes "economical” to develop literacy and media; hence ur-
banization and other modernizing trends grow together for a
period. 14 But after a certain degree of urbanization exists, then
further growth of cities no longer affects other factors in the same
degree. Our analysis locates this "critical optimum” at 252, after
which urbanization ceases to play a determinant role because
enough people have been relocated in cities to assure the personnel
requirements of modem production. As many countries in our sample
long ago passed this urbanizing optimum, and since have turned
to other factors to maintain self-sustaining growth, urbanization
naturally yields the lowest (though still high) coefficient.

That the literacy coefficient is highest also supports our analysis.

( 64 ) Perspectives

Literacy is the basic personal skill that underlies the whole mod-
ernizing sequence. With literacy people acquire more than the
simple skill of reading. Professor Becker concludes that the written
word first equipped men with a “transpersonal memory”; Professor
Innis writes that, historically, “man’s activities and powers were
roughly extended in proportion to the increased use of written
records.” 15 The very act of achieving distance and control over a
formal language gives people access to the world of vicarious expe-
rience and trains them to use the complicated mechanism of em-
pathy which is needed to cope with this world. It supplies media
consumers, who stimulate media production, thereby activating
the reciprocal relationship whose consequences for modernization
we have noted. This is why media participation, in every country
we have studied, exhibits a centripetal tendency. Those who read
newspapers also tend to be the heaviest consumers of movies,
broadcasts, and all other media products. Throughout the Middle
East illiterate respondents said of their literate compatriots: “They
live in another world.” Thus literacy becomes the sociological pivot
in the activation of psychic mobility, the publicly shared skill
which binds modern man’s varied daily round into a consistent
participant lifestyle.

We come, then, to political participation. Democratic gover-
ance comes late, historically, and typically appears as a crowning
institution of the participant society. That the voting coefficient
is so high indicates that these 54 countries have achieved stable
growth at a high level of modernity. In these countries the urban
literate tends to be also a newspaper reader, a cash customer and
a voter. The modem “system” of self-sustaining growth operates
across the land in these 54 countries— as their cities sprouted sub-
urbs, as their urban districts grew into “urban regions,” their na-
tional increase of literacy and participation kept pace. This capacity
to incorporate continuing social change within the existing frame-
work of institutions has become a distinctive structural feature
of the developed modem societies. In a century that has reinstated
revolution as a method of social change, they have managed to
adapt their own accelerated growth mainly by nonviolent pro-
cedures.

What of the other countries? What, in particular, of the 19
countries that had to be dropped from our multiple correlations
(reducing our sample from 73 to 54) because they failed to supply

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 65 )

data on themselves? Good social auditing is itself an index of mod-
ernity— only the rational modem perspective seriously believes that
keeping records on one’s past and present will help to shape future
changes in a desirable direction; only modem institutions have
developed the techniques of self-observation which sustain this
belief. In our world survey, the countries with the least adequate
statistical records tended also to be the least developed countries.
What of them?

4. The Hurdles of Modernization

When tire underdeveloped lands of the world are tested by
our model of modernity, the enormous hurdles in the path to
modernization stand out more clearly. What the West accom-
plished gradually over three past centuries is not so easy for the
East to achieve rapidly in the present century.

Take the factor of physical mobility, which initiated Western
take-off in an age when the earth was underpopulated in terms of
the world man-land ratio. Land was to be had, more or less, for
the finding. The great explorers took over vast real estate by
planting a flag; these were slowly filled with new populations over
generations. Since then, the earth’s population has multiplied many
times, while its acreage has remained about the same. Today ex-
ploration occurs mainly in outer space or inner psyche, while the
world man-land ratio discourages international mobility. Immigra-
tion laws in the more developed countries are designed to keep
underdeveloped peoples at home.

At home, in these countries, physical mobility still takes mainly
the form of urbanization. But urbanization is no simple panacea
for all ills. We have seen that its historic function is to stimulate
take-off; thereafter it yields priority to other factors of self-
sustaining growth. The critical limits of urbanization required in
each country are a function of its population, more particularly
of its man-land ratio. It is this which impedes take-off in many
underdeveloped but overpopulated countries; where the man-land
ratio is very high, urbanization is indispensable but hard to achieve
according to rational plan. In such countries, natural increase tends
to exceed growth of resources (including usable land) and popu-
lation density rises steadily.

Sheer density' of population, without countervailing urbaniza-

( 66 ) Perspectives

tion, operates in turn as an anti-literacy force in most societies.
Education is cheaper when pupils live close together and hence,
other things being equal, density should be associated with greater
literacy. But, without urbanization, other things are not equal-
i.e., the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth are
much lower. This has a direct depressing effect on all public serv-
ices, notably free public education. Dense nonurban societies,
where national income is relatively small, tend to maintain rela-
tively fewer schools by public funds; also, since per capita income
is lower and less widely distributed, fewer individuals can afford
to attend school.

Hence, the more people there are in a given area, the smaller
is the proportion being educated and tire harder it is to get a rising
proportion of literates among them— until they begin to be rede-
ployed into cities. In sparsely settled lands the influence of ur-
banization is less marked and literacy rates will probably respond
directly to rises in per capita national income. But in populous
societies urbanization is the intervening variable and is crucial
for the take-off toward increasing literacy. Only when dense popu-
lations show a significant rate of urbanization do literacy rates
begin to rise. The interaction of density and urbanism as factors
conditioning literacy may be represented in the figure below.

High

DENSITY

Low

URBANISM

High Low

High

Low

Literacy

Literacy

High

Indeterminate

Literacy

Literacy

In countries of high urbanization, as our correlations have
shown, literacy will also be high regardless of density ( e.g., Britain
and Western Europe). Where urbanism is low, generally literacy
also will tend to be low. ( This consequence is less marked in coun-
tries of low density, hence the classification “indeterminate liter-
acy.”) But it is very clear that low urbanism plus high density goes

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory { 67 )

with low literacy in virtually all extant countries. To report only
the most striking results of our several tests, correlation of literacy
with density (defined as population per square kilometer) yielded
a negative coefficient of —.60. This inverse relationship was about
as consistently negative, for all 73 countries, as the correlation of
-{-.64 between literacy and urbanization had been positive.

A similar result was obtained by correlating urbanism with
media participation. For 54 countries the coefficient was .58. When
the less developed countries were added, making a total of 73
countries, the coefficient dropped to .47. As striking as this de-
crease was the great “scatter” of data reported by the under-
developed countries. Whereas the modem nations have achieved
“optimum” relations between urbanism, literacy, media participa-
tion, the traditional societies exhibit extremely variant “growth”
patterns (deviations from the regression lines). Some are more
urban than literate, others more media participant than urban.

In the Middle East, two recent trends account for much of
this imbalance. One has been the accelerated postwar movement
to the capital cities in each country. This is “urbanization” for
census purposes, but it seriously revises the historic meaning of
die term. In Cairo, for example, there is* a huge floating popula-
tion widi no home but the city streets. They attend no schools,
do no work, get no cash, buy no goods. It would be more accurate
to tally these involuntary urbanites as "internal rural refugees,”
but until some such auditing change is made the Egyptian census
will continue to show a huge and growing surplus of urban over
literate population. The second postwar trend is the rapid dif-
fusion of cheap (or free) radio receivers among the rural popula-
tions of the Middle East. This again is an alteration of the Western
model, in which media participation reflected a market mechanism
—radios produced privately for profit were bought individually
for pleasure. Radios distributed gratis by government facilitate
social control” rather than “individual participation”; they also
explain why most Arab countries show an excess of radio-listeners
over urban literates.

Such events introduce a new stochastic factor into the his-
torical model of modernization— one that is not accounted for by
the model. Such a factor is the effort by new governments around
the world to induce certain symbols of modernity by policy de-

( 68 ) Perspectives

cisions, in a sequence which disregards the basic arrangement of
lifeways out of which slowly evolved those modern institutions
now so hastily symbolized. A stochastic factor may be a genuine
innovation which will remake the model; or it may be a risk taken
in ignorance of the model. The evidence now available suggests
that, in the Middle East, we are usually dealing with the latter
alternative.

An instance is the new global fashion to install some voting
mechanism as a symbol of modem desires rather than as a func-
tional agency of modem governance. Democracy has become a
world fad, spread across national lines by symbolic diffusion,
rather than an institutional outgrowth of needs internal to an in-
creasingly participant society. As a result, some modernizing coun-
tries show extraordinarily high (“ahis tori cal”) voting rates. Indeed,
whereas voting correlates highly with the other variables in the
modern countries, sharp deviations occur in Asia and the Middle
East. Thus Egypt, in 1956, ordered its impoverished rural masses
to “vote” in a single-option plebiscite, which gave Nasser the 91%
endorsement common in such performances. These great "under-
developed areas” have in common the historic poverty of their re-
sources relative to the soaring heights of their current aspirations.
They are inadequately urbanized, industrialized and literate, rela-
tive to their urge rapidly to install the symbols of modern partici-
pant society.

This answers one question only to raise another. Since the
stability of modern societies has been associated over past cen-
turies with the whole “system” of participant behavior gradually
evolved, how can these new societies-in-a-hurry hope to achieve
stability while acquiring mobility? The question is not rhetorical;
the writer does not believe that he knows “the” answer. History
is a matter of secular trends, not eternal laws, and the persistence
of a certain pattern of social change in the past does not mean
that things must always be so. On the contrary, the very act of
describing past trends and clarifying the conditions of their occur-
rence may help to shape policies that can redirect the course of
history. We turn then to a key problem of modernization in under-
developed countries: How have they gone about diffusing the
capacity for psychic mobility, along with other capacities that His-
torically have equipped people for efficient functioning in partici-
pant society?

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory

( 69 )

5. The Model of Transition

Our historical model provided suitable terms for describing
the degree of modernization present in a given society at a given
time. The indices of urbanization, literacy, media and political
participation discriminated efficiently the relative positions in 1950
of very many countries on all the continents of the world. But the
model was static to this point. A dynamic component was needed
to show how a country moved from one phase to the next, why an
urban person regularly became a literate and a radio-listener and
a voter. Such a dynamic component must connect institutional
changes with alterations in the prevailing personal style.

We had already identified the characterological transformation
that accompanies modernization as psychic mobility, with empathy
as its mechanism. Hie questions now were: how can empathy be
tested? how can die results of such testing be collated with the
indices of participant behavior? What we needed to learn was
whether a person who shows high empathy also exhibits die other
attributes, and vice versa. Since empathy is an autonomous per-
sonality variable, it is not revealed by any census data, but must
be elicited through psychological testing of individuals. At tin's
point die Middle East survey supplied the missing link. The inter-
views contained a set of nine ‘projective questions” which we used
to test each respondents empathic capacity:

1. If you were made editor of a newspaper, what kind of a
paper would you run?

2. What do you drink you miss by not knowing what the
newspapers have to say?

3. How do you think people who go to die movies differ from
those who don’t?

4. If you were put in charge of a radio station, what kinds
of programs would you like to put on?

5. If for some reason you could not live in our country, what
other country would you choose to live in?

6. Suppose that I could tell you anything you wanted to know
about (this country): What two questions would you be
most interested in asking?

( 70 ) Perspectives

7. What is the biggest problem that people in the same cir-
cumstances as yourself face in life?

8. What do you think people in the same circumstances as
yourself can do to help solve this problem?

9. Suppose that you were made head of the government.
What are some of the things you would do?

What these questions have in common is that they ask the
respondent to imagine himself in a situation other than his real
one. They are “role-playing” questions that require, for responsive-
ness, some capacity to empathize— to imagine what it must be
like to be head of a government, editor of a newspaper, manager
of a radio station, or even “people like yourself.” The strenuous-
ness of such demands upon persons untutored in empathic skills
was underlined by the many respondents, in every country, who
thought of suicide rather than imagine themselves in these exalted
ranks. “My God! How can you say such a thing?” gasped the shep-
herd, when Tosun put such questions to him.

The historical course of empathy was underscored for me,
while working on these interviews, by an advertisement that
came through the mail one morning. Printed across the envelope,
in bold red letters, was the query: “Suppose you were the editor
of Time . . .” The circular letter inside described the typi-
cal workday of a Time editor. An American mass-circulation
magazine mails such an item to millions of names, assembled
from a variety of ‘lists,” confident that the “teaser question” on
the envelope will be comprehensible, interesting and entertain-
ing. In the Middle East, for many millions, such questions are
baffling, disturbing, and even impious: “It has never been thus!”

Our task was to devise a method to determine the degree of
association between empathy, as tested by these questions, and
the lifeways of modernity. The solution of this problem provided
our theory of modernization with the dynamic component needed
to analyze ongoing changes in the Middle East today. Our solution
was to show, empirically, that persons who are urban, literate,
participant, and empathic differ from persons who lack any of these
attributes— and differ on a significant personal trait which is dis-
tinctive of the modem style. Such a trait is “having opinions on
public matters. Traditional man has habitually regarded public
matters as none of his business. For the Modem men in a par-

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 71 )

ticipant society, on the contrary, such matters are fraught with
interest and importance. A broad range of opinions on public ques-
tions can be taken as a distinctive mark of modernity. Accordingly,
die central schema of this study can be represented in die basic
typology of modernization below. 30

The Basic Typology

7>p«

LUeracr

Urbanism

Media Participation

Empathy

Opinion Kongo

Modern

+

+

+

+

1

A

—

+

+

+

2

Tramilionat

B

—

—

+

+

3

C

-

-

-

+

4

Traditional

—

—

—

—

5

If modernization is the transition to participant society, then
die direction of change in public communication is toward a con-
standy expanding opinion arena. The significant mode of par-
ticipating, in any network of human communication, is by sharing
a common interest in the messages it transmits— i.e., by having
opinions about the matters which concern other participants.
(Nonparticipation, conversely, consists of neither knowing nor
caring about the messages relayed through a given network.) In
a large public network, such as that of a nation, perfect participa-
tion is impossible— and perhaps undesirable. A network would
hardly be manageable in which all citizens attended to all messages
and expressed opinions on all public questions. There are deter-
minate limits— maxima as well as minima— to the degree of parti-
cipation appropriate for particular networks. The modernizing
tendency is toward networks that can handle maximum participa-
tion, and concurrentiy to develop the participants needed to man
these networks.

A person becomes a participant by learning to “have opinions”
—further, the more numerous and varied the matters on which he
has opinions, the more participant he is. To rank each respondent
as a participant in the Middle Eastern opinion arena, we counted
die number and variety of items in the questionnaire on which he
expressed some opinion (i.e., did not say “I don’t know” or “I have
no opinion”). This enabled us to find a number for each respondent
which determined his rank-order in the column headed “Opinion
Range.” Those in rank 1 had the most opinions, tiiose in rank 2

( 72 ) Perspectives

somewhat fewer opinions, and so on down to those in rank 5 with
the fewest (or no) opinions.

We then sought to determine whether, as hypothesized, the
higher a person’s opinion range, the more likely he was to score
high on all indexes of modernity. And so, as the scale patterns show,
it turned out. The top opinion-holders (rank 1) typically were
literate, urban, media participants, and high empathizers. Among
illiterates, those living in cities tended to have more opinions
(rank 2) than rurals. Among illiterate rurals, those with a sig-
nificant measure of media exposure scored higher (rank 3)
than those without such exposure. This left a group which-in
terms of literacy, residence, media exposure— should have been
homogeneous in the opinion range, but in fact was not. Some of
these individuals had significantly more opinions than the others.
The only satisfactory way to account for this divergence was by
our personality variable— empathy. For what distinguished these
illiterate, rural, nonparticipant individuals (rank 4) from their
peers (rank 5) was a keener interest in impersonal matters, a
deeper desire to become participants of the opinion arena. They
were marked less by their manifest ways than by their latent wants.

Once this was clear, our data fell beautifully into place. For
the true Transitional is defined, dynamically, by what he wants to
become. What differentiates him from his Traditional peers is a
different latent structure of aptitudes and attitudes (see Appen-
dix). 17 The aptitude is empathy— he "sees” things the others do not
see, “lives” in a world populated by imaginings alien to the con-
strictive world of the others. The attitude is desire - he wants really
to see the things he has hitherto "seen” only in his mind’s eye,
really to live in the world he has “lived” in only vicariously. These
are the sources of his deviant ways. When many individuals show
deviation in this direction, then a transition is under way in their
society. In die next chapter, we show empirically how diis transi-
tion is at work in every Middle Eastern country, widi results that
spell die passing of traditional society from that area of the world.

Here we stress that the transition to participant society hinges
upon the desire among individuals to participate. It grows as more
an more individuals take leave of the constrictive traditional uni-
verse and nudge their psyche toward the expansive new land of
nearts desire. The great gap is passed when a person begins to
— ^ aVe °P inions "Particularly on matters which, according to his

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 73 )

neighbors, "do not concern him,” The empathic skill which makes
tliis possible is not highly valued in the traditional community.
There people are taught to handle the ego with minimum awareness
of alternatives to current practices— in the technical sense, com-
pulsively. The Constrictive Self is the approved personal style.
Self-manipulation, continuous rearrangement of the self-system to
incorporate new experience, is regarded as unworthy of any person
with “good character .” 18

The classic case is The Grocer of Balgat, repudiated on all
sides as he sought to incorporate the new identities of his vicarious
experience. The Balgati feared his opinions and called him “in-
fidel." Tosun found his role-playing distasteful and wrote of him:
“Although he is on the same level with the other villagers . . .
he most evidently wishes to feel that he is closer to me than he
is to them.” The Transitionals, at various phases of modernization,
are making their way toward an unclear future via a path replete
with hard bumps and unsuspected detours. Their voyage entails
a sustained commingling of joyous anticipations with lingering
anxieties, sensuous euphoria with recurrent shame, guilt and puz-
zlement. From their changes of pace and their shifts of direction
we learn how they perceive the terrain, its pitfalls and its promises.

A deep problem of values is imbedded in the life histories of
these men-in-motion. The moral issues of modernization often
are reduced to tliis: Should they want what they want? Since they
want what we have, Western responses to this question usually
reflect only our own value-dilemmas. Rather more relevant is the
judgment of Middle Easterners on what they have and what they
want. If we resist the temptation to adjudicate conflicting prefer-
ences among others, at least long enough to see how they ad-
judicate these options themselves, then we have a sounder basis
than our own conventional values for moral judgment.

For example: a very powerful finding of our study is that Middle
Easterners who are modernizing consider themselves happier than
do those who remain within traditional lifeways. This is in strik-
ing contrast with the impressions conveyed by some observers,
often from highly modem settings themselves, who feel that the
undermining of traditional ways by new desires must be a net
loss. Among such observers the passing of cherished images of
passive peasantry, noble nomads, brave Beduin evokes regrets.
But these regrets are not felt by the modernizing peasants, no-

( 74 ) Perspectives

mads, JBeduin themselves, or felt less disapprovingly by them than
by the moderns who study them and love the familiar way they
used to be. Thus Tosun, the bright young modem from Ankara,
gave his sympathy to the miserable intimidated Shepherd hut only
his indignation to tire ambitious outspoken Grocer.

Deep sentiment for the splendid past can dim perception of
its passing. So distinguished a commentator as Professor Hocldng,
when obliged to recognize the prevalence of modernist desires
among Middle Easterners, does so with regret and even resentment:

The most important single fact about these people, for the political
discussions of the moment, is their rendezvous with change, the god of
“modernity.” They are in process of growth: and since this is so, they are
no longer to be identified with what they were yesterday but rather
with what they wall be tomorrow . 19

Sentiment here produces a misleading dichotomy. Yesterday is
perceived as a splendid whole, now wholly gone. But this obscures
the evident shaping of Middle East tomorrows by all their yester-
days and by what they seek each new today. There is no uniform
Tomorrow just as there was no single Yesterday. It is precisely by
“the political discussions of the moment,” so impatiently dismissed
by Professor Hocking, that the Middle Eastern future will be
devised and revised through a succession of tomorrows.

I take respectful issue with Professor Hocking because the
issue is central in the perspective of this book. One can admire
great achievements of the past without despising small efforts in
the present. It is as a monumental summation of small efforts that
many great achievements can be viewed. One such is the western
achievement of a Participant Society, which is a summation, of
desires for personal betterment that led through centuries of “po-
litical discussions of the moment” to institutions of civil liberty,
public welfare and democratic governance. In our view, disdain
for the transitory controversies of politics springs from an erro-
neous theory that the Long-Bun is somehow independent of its own
sequence of short-runs. Our effort is rather to study the relatedness
of political, economic, communication behavior among the Middle
Easterners who are piecing together the grand design of their
future society.

Until now we have stressed the psychological dimension be-
cause the great dramas of societal transition occur through indi-
viduals involved in solving their personal problems and living

Modernizing Styles of Life: A Theory ( 75 )

their private lives. But certain of these dramas signify more for
the future than others. Those Middle Easterners whose private
lives have become permeated by the public questions will prove
most enlightening for us. In the drama of modernization, those
who have already incorporated the trends of the times (The
Modems) and those who have not yet been touched by them (The
Traditional) present a relatively static posture. Tire meaning of
events is best clarified by those whom we perceive at the moment
of "engagement”— a moment which occurs when an expansive Self,
newly equipped with a functioning empathy, perceives connections
between its private dilemmas and pubh'c issues. This is political
consciousness, in the larger sense, and its acquisition distinguishes
those who have been pierced by the present and in responding
shape the future. The Transitionals are our key to the changing
Middle East. What they are today is a passage from what they
once were to what they are becoming. Their passage, writ large,
is the passing of traditional society in the Middle East.

III.

The Passing of Traditional
Society: A Survey

“Systems have passed away before you. Do hut
travel in the land and see the consequences for those
who did deny the messengers.”

— Koran , Surah III, 137

THE PASSING of traditional society from the Middle East
is thus the passing of many traditional lives. All movements of
social change alter the ways in which human beings live out their
daily round. The process of modernization powerfully transforms
individual lifeways. The move from the familiar and deeply per-
sonal life of a family farm in an isolated village to the strange
impersonality of a “job” in a busy city crowded with unknown
persons is one such transformation— probably the one that is most
often experienced by modernizing individuals in the Middle East
today.

But different figures also appear in this landscape. There are
persons who would like to, but can not or do not, move alone to
the city. There are villages to which, willy-nilly, die city comes-
either via a new concrete road as in Turkey, or via radio as in
E gyph or via adventurous young villagers who shutde to and
fro as in Lebanon. By whatever mediod the city invades die village,
its coming means that great dramas of reception versus rejection
will be played out in the private lives of individual villagers. The
poignancy is heightened for the modem observer, who knows that
sense the city will always “win,” by the great human cost
a e to these dramas because the actors are unaware that a rough
aft of the third act is already written. It is possible that the
' ' logical transformation required by modernization cannot

( 76 )

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 77 )

be produced without such conflicts of wills and ways. But aware-
ness of the fuller process could lessen some of the needlessly tragic
results.

In the city, too, the modernizing landscape contains many
varied figures. Some migrants never penetrate the urban curtain
and live out their lives in a miserable daily dying. Others find in
the industrial discipline a full and satisfying life. Still others are
infused with new dreams of glory— imagining themselves at the
head of an Islamic brotherhood, or of a proletarian union, or of a
Titoist state defying all the mighty. Many, perhaps most, simply
by to learn a little more, get a little more, have a little more.

Those who already have much— whether of power, wealth,
status— also are obliged to rearrange their private lives, or at least
their private emotions, in terms of the changes wrought by mod-
ernization in the world they know. How shall a Jordanian Qadi,
official administrator of Islamic jurisprudence, reach proper deci-
sions in a secularizing world when he cannot even quite make up
his mind about the movies? What shall an Egyptian journalist,
schooled in the great tradition of European liberalism, write in a
land inflamed by Arab nationalism and primitive xenophobia?
How shall a Lebanese girl, newly graduated from the univer-
sity, with a taste for the arts, resolve the conflicts between her own
awakened desires and her father’s traditional austerities? How, to
put the most general question, shall those who have dispose them-
selves toward those who want P

Such a landscape requires, as we put it in chapter II, some prin-
ciple of unity in diversity. There we presented a principle of
unity— a theory of modernization that articulates the common com-
pulsions to which all Middle Eastern peoples are subject. To ground
the theory in human history, we observed the operation of these
common compulsions over past centuries of modernization in the
West and recent decades of modernization around the contemporary
world. The unifying principle seems well grounded, but the ques-
tion remains whether it helps to clarify the manifest diversity of
the living Middle East.

To answer this question requires data which faithfully record
diversity by permitting each relevant individual to speak for him-
self. Such data test any unifying theory by seeing whether the
regularities it postulates do in fact occur among diverse individuals.
The data of this book come mainly from a sample interview survey.

( 78 ) Perspectives

which gave living Middle Easterners the opportunity to speak for
themselves. The case studies that follow will report the rich di-
versity shown in these interviews. This chapter aims to establish
the regularities underlying the variety, seeking to test the theory
against the data out of which it developed.

In reading this chapter, it is well to hear in mind the purpose
of the book and the perspective from which it is written. The book
seeks to explain why and show how individuals and their institu-
tions modernize together. It denies a unique role to “human nature”
or to “social determinism.” Having no taste for beating dead horses,
we do not even acknowledge these as issues, but go directly to
a “behavioral” perspective. To wit: social change operates through
persons and places. Either individuals and their environments
modernize together or modernization leads elsewhere than intended.
If new institutions of political, economic, cultural behavior are to
change in compatible ways, then inner coherence must be pro-
vided by the personality matrix which governs individual behavior.
We conceive modernity as a participant style of life; we identify
its distinctive personality mechanism as empathy . Modernizing
individuals and institutions, like chicken and egg, reproduce these
traits in each other.

The book seeks, further, to exemplify this conception in the
behavior of modernizing individuals and institutions in the living
Middle East. To do this, I have made one book out of two enter-
prises— a theory of modernization and a set of case studies. This
curtails the theory, a formal statement of which would require
fuller presentation of economic, political, sociological and psycho-
logical data. It also curtails the case studies, for other events are
occurring in each Middle East country than those we have selected
for attention. The abridgement requires indulgence, then, from
both social scientist and area expert. Being aimed at both, it may
end by satisfying neither . 0

The general reader may be less concerned with these matters,
and more concerned that the book is written from a perspective
which does not regard America today as an overindulged fat cow,
chewing cud and yielding milk. Such a view is in vogue among
Western intellectuals today, but this is not the way Middle East*

references in the back of the book do, however, lead the interested
readers to fuller discussion of central points in the theory and the cases that
nave been published elsewhere.

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 79 )

emers see America. There, current political animosities coexist
with the respect that leads to imitation. The case studies show
how many variants are registered on any generalization about the
Middle East today. But if forced to generalize, I would reverse
the currently fashionable formula among Western intellectuals.
What America is— to condense a rule more powerful than its
numerous exceptions— the modernizing Middle East seeks to be-
come. The meaning of public power and wealth for private com-
fort and fun is being learned. 0

Those who regard this as ethnocentrism should try an exercise
in self-analysis: Compare your own life with that of any Middle
Easterner you ever knew. If you don’t know any, try a different
exercise: Ponder the French argument, before the League of
Nations, against “a servile imitation of the schemes in force in
Western industrial countries” by Middle East lands. This line
thought turned out, in the specific Syrian case, to be a defense of
absentee landlordism against the wretched peasants and of anti-
unionism against the impoverished proletarians. (Try that tune on
a liberal harp! ) Everyone opposes “servile imitation” as he opposes
beating grandmothers. But no advocate of Middle Eastern felicity
can properly oppose their quest for things they lack because, in his
opinion, Americans have too much of these same things for their
own good. Here again, abridgement of the argument may only
say too much for some readers without saying enough for others.
We turn, then, to the matter in hand and begin by telling how
tlie survey was made.

1. The Story of This Book

The story falls into two main phases: first, organization of the
survey, field work, and preliminary analysis of the data by the
Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University; second,
a comprehensive re-analysis of the data and writing of this book
in the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. The present writer
participated in both phases.

The survey, started in September 1950, was completed in
seven countries— Greece,. Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria

* Those with an appetite for intra-American polemics can follow this argu-
ment further in my "Comfort and Fun: Morality in a Nice Society,” The
American Scholar (Spring 1958).

( 80 ) Perspectives

and Iran. (The Greek survey, which served as a pretest for
the interview schedule and sampling design, has not been re-
ported in this book. ) The interviews were made in each country
by native scholars, usually teachers or advanced students at a
major university, who were briefed and supervised by the Ameri-
can in charge. Interviews were made in the native tongue and
subsequently translated into English by the bilingual interviewers
or at the central office, where the interviews were also checked
for accuracy and coverage. The questionnaire was so designed
that if the interviewee was not a radio-listener or movie-goer, many
subsequent questions automatically were not asked of him. Natu-
rally, interviews with persons exposed to the media lasted longer
than interviews with un exposed respondents. Since “filter ques-
tions” of this type were used throughout the schedule, the dura-
tion of interviews varied from one to six hours between different
types of respondents. The basic questionnaire remained the same
in all six of our countries. Minor variations were introduced, as
the survey moved from one country to another, designed mainly
to improve the questions or to adapt them to local circumstances.

It is not appropriate here to attempt a detailed account of the
organizational and administrative problems which this pioneer
survey encountered. Professor Glock has suggested the complica-
tions in a letter:

Both Millard and Carlson outdid themselves in a job which involved
all sorts of political negotiations and interpersonal operations which, un-
fortunately, cannot be properly recorded at this time. Working in the
field was an 18-hour-day and seven-day-week job. There were clear-
ances to be obtained, records to be kept, progress reports to be written,
administrative red tape to be cut, and diplomatic functions to be per-
ormed in keeping government officials, interviewers and respondents
happy about the project being done at all. 2

In Iraq, indeed, the difficulties were so great that this country was
dropped and Iran was substituted in its place. Elsewhere the work
continued and about 2,000 interviews from all countries were re-
ceived in New York starting in the Fall of 1951. Of these, ap-
proximately 1,600 (omitting all interviews from Greece and those
f° m other countries which arrived too late or too incomplete to
be used) have figured in the making of this book.
r ”, f 1G , meantime preliminary analysis had begun. The first
eport to be completed was that on Turkey by the present writer,

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 81 )

with the assistance of G. K. Schueller and Mary Stycos. This was
followed by reports on Jordan by J. M. Stycos, on Lebanon by
W. N. McPhee and R. B. Meyersohn, on Egypt by P. L. Kendall
and B. B. Ringer, on Iran by B. B. Ringer and D. L. Sills, and a
comparative report on the four Arab countries by P. L. Kendall and
Eliliu Katz. 8 These studies were reported in an impressive series
of Bureau memoranda. 4 A comprehensive archive of reports made
during the preliminary phase is available at the Bureau of Applied
Social Research. 8

The present re-analysis of tire data was made possible by the
Bureau, which invited this writer to undertake the job under the
auspices of the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. The
earlier studies had been made by different authors working on
separate countries. Each analyst deliberately sought to test differ-
ent hypotheses involving different sets of indices. Accordingly, a
variety of non-comparable tabulations and conclusions appeared
in their reports. The re-analysis undertook to recode and reprocess
the original data again, using a single typology and common in-
dices to test for comparable data in all countries. The scope of
the re-analysis was restricted by the original data from the field.
The open questionnaire was congenial to wide-ranging re-analysis,
but the controlled sampling procedure imposed severe limits. Be-
fore specifying these limitations, it is appropriate to note that this
survey was a pioneering application of modem research proce-
dures in an area where such research is virtually unknown and
where some of its basic requirements— e.g., census data— are either
lacking or misleading. Under these conditions, the Bureau made
a remarkable effort, which merits honorable mention in the annals
of American social surveys.

Nonetheless, the reader who wishes to evaluate the conclusions
for himself must be aware of the limitations imposed by the data.
First, the sample in each country was purposively controlled to
overrepresent the population of movie-goers, radio listeners and
newspaper readers. The projects manual on “basic sampling pro-
cedure” gave tile instructions below for simultaneously controlling
the sample by radio-listening versus non-listening, urban versus
rural residence, and sex. Beyond this, the sample was to divide radio
listeners equally between those who do and do not listen to foreign
radio; between respondents under and over 35 years of age; be-
tween high and low income respondents (with the specific cutting

( 82 ) Perspectives

point for each country to be determined in the field). The sampling
was confined geographically to three provinces in each country,
to accomplish the field work with minimum cost of time and
money and with maximum efficiency in deployment of interviewers.

The Sample: Simultaneously Controlled Characteristics

% of Intcrvkvtl

Radio

Listener— Large Urban— Male

26.4

II

II

— “ " —Female

6.6

M

II

—Medium " —Male

13.6

ii

It

— *' " — Femate

3.4

II

• 1

— Rural —Mole

13.6

M

II

— " —Female

3.4

Non-Radio

Listener— Large Urban— Male

13.6

<1

• 1

•• — " “ —Female

3.4

ll

M

“ —Medium " —Male

6.4

II

ll

*' — “ “ —Female

1,6

II

ll

“ —Rural —Male

6.4

II

II

" _ “ —Female

1.6

100.0%

These controls imposed a limiting condition of some importance
upon the re-analysis. No rigorous inference could be made from
the controlled sample to the total population of any country. "Within
this self-imposed limitation, we have taken the liberty of sug
gesting some “national” inferences that seem plausible either (a)
when tire distributions of the data run together so consistently an
significantly as to suggest an invariant, or highly probable, re a
tionship between two attributes, or (b) when we have been a e
to compare these data with comparable figures given elsevv ere
for die population as a whole. (The latter procedure, as the rea er
must recall each time that it is used, is risky because statistics m
every Middle Eastern country are incomplete and unreliable.)

Instead of working from sample to total population, therefore,
we were obliged to work from sample to a dreoretical typology
We have already oudined the main features of this typology an
shown the global applicability of its indices to countries under
going modernization. Here we wish to determine the regularities
underlying the variations that appear in die six Middle East coun-
tries. Our theory of modernization requires that we specify regu-
larities of institutional and personal behavior which will account
for the social changes now visible in all the Middle Eastern lands.

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 83 )

The questions needing clarification are: Who is changing, in what
direction , at what rate ? The general response to these questions
already presented by our theory can be recapitulated briefly.

From what to wJiat? The direction of change is the same in all
the Middle East lands. Everywhere the passing of traditional life-
ways is visible; the secular trend is toward mobility— physical,
social and psychic mobility. Who is changing ? In every Middle
East country the transitional people exhibit more of those charac-
teristics we have already identified with the participant style:
urbanism, literacy, media consumption and empathic capacity. We
shall see, as our data unfold, that these entail an array of common
sociological attributes such as age, sex, occupation: e.g., the literate
young “unfarming” males (as they were called in Balgat) tend
to lead the procession, but others follow dose behind. At what
rate P The rate of social change everywhere is a function (probably
a linear function) of the number of individuals accruing to the
transitional stratum. The more persons who are “going modem”
in any country, the higher is its overall performance on the indices
of modernity. Accordingly, the spedfied levels of achieved change
vary widely from one Middle East country to another.

These variant levels of national achievement, in turn, explain the
different impact of modernization upon persons living in the sev-
eral countries today. The nation provides the channels through
which individuals transform their own lives. Each person may de-
cide for himself how to use the opportunities available to him.
But it is the national posture which regulates the number and kind
of opportunities that are available— how many, where they can
lead, how fast. So, persons of the same type (in our typology) often
lead quite different lives in different lands, To be a Traditional in
Lebanon, where a modem communication network brings all types
of people closer together, is quite a different life-situation from
being a Traditional in Iran, where such people often live in vil-
lages isolated from any urban centers and follow a daily round
more akin to the Biblical epoch than to the twentieth century. A
Modem in Syria tends to be an active and articulate young man,
whereas in Jordan he is usually a disgruntled refugee from Palestine.
Whereas Transitionals in modernizing Turkey are generally pro-
ductive, optimistic and self-confident, their opposite numbers in
Egypt are more often frustrated, dysphoric and ambivalent.

The logic of the relationship between the three types remains

(84) Perspectives

valid within nations. In each country Transitionals score higher
on our indices of modernity than do Traditional and lower than
do Modems. But the average score of all Transitionals (as of the
other types ) is higher in some countries than in others. This con-
firms the obvious fact that people live in places and that circum-
stances alter cases. But we wish to go beyond bromides and inves-
tigate the inner workings of these relationships. To determine the
relative positions of Middle Eastern individuals and countries on
a common scale of modernization, we used three central hypoth-
eses: (1) if the mean scores for all three types are consistently
higher in country X than country Y, then country X is more modem;
(2) If the Transitional mean scores in country X are consistently
closer to the Modems, then country X is more dynamic; (3) If
the mean scores in country X consistently show small differences
between all three types, then country X is more stable.

By “more modem” we mean that more people have gone fur-
ther in transforming their traditional style of life, as scored by our
four indices. By “more dynamic” we mean that modernization is
occurring at a faster tempo— more people are changing more rapidly
in the directions stipulated. By “more stable” we mean that the
class-cleavages are less salient; accordingly, that modernization
is more likely to proceed without violent discontinuities of policy
and personnel (e.g., revolutions, coups d’etat, riots, assassinations).

A very striking fact of Middle Eastern life today is that these
three attributes of modernism, dynamism, stability tend to go to-
gether. Turkey and Lebanon, the most modern of our six countries,
are also the most dynamic and the most stable countries (by t e
definitions just given). The explanation appears to be that they
have passed their “take-off” points and are well launched in a
process of self-sustaining growth. This is not to say that they have
solved all their problems— which is an accomplishment of utopia,
not of modernization. It is to say that their problems are priman y
economic, that programs designed to solve these problems do not
include violent transformations of the social system as a method,
that political life has reduced the cataclysmic issues of ideology' to
the manageable dimensions of planning.

The other four countries, less modem today, are also less dy-
namic ( in rate of modernization ) and less stable. The great postwar
events in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran have been the violent struggles
for the control of power— struggles notably absent in Turkey and

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 85 )

Lebanon, where the control of power has been decided by elec-
tions. The omnipotence of politics, a lesson impressed on the 20th
century by the Bolsheviks, has radically transformed the course of
modernization in these less developed lands. Such proto-Bolshe-
vization arises independently of, but then tends to converge with,
their foreign policy positions in the bipolar world arena. This is
a major problem in political sociology, and no serious student of
social change in the living Middle East can ignore it.

We wish to come upon this problem, so to speak, from its proper
social matrix. It is “no accident” that Turkey and Lebanon are
democratizing while Egypt and Syria tend toward bolshevizing.
(Jordan and Iran, we shall see, are not yet far enough along to
be characterized.) On our analysis, Turkey and Lebanon are past
take-off and set on a modernizing course, whereas Egypt and
Syria, seek to evade the historic route to take-off by tying a new
bypass. It is no accident because, on the theory that has been set
forth, political behavior is but one aspect of a behavioral matrix.
People acquire the capacity for political participation by learning,
under the permissive conditions of mobility, how to participate in
all sectors of public life. The mechanism is empathy and its opera-
tion produces opinion on public matters. The outcome is a skill
syndrome, a capacity to rearrange one’s self-system on short notice,
which flourishes in a setting of balanced urbanism, literacy, media
participation. Our first task, then, is to provide data appropriate
for ranking the Middle East nations as social settings conducive
to mobility, empathy, opinion, participation.

2. Ranking the Nations: Societal Audits

As a starting-point, we assembled data on the principal indices
of modernization for all six countries from 1950 census data. These
are presented in Table 1. Before presenting these figures, it is
necessary to state why they must be handled with considerable
reserve.

First, Middle East statistics are a hazardous enterprise. Few
governments in the area are properly equipped for accurate social
bookkeeping. Even those which operate central statistical audits
sometimes conceive their function as boosting morale rather than
recording information. This leads to publication of figures which
correspond poorly with any verifiable observations. Second, the

( 86 ) Perspectives

absence of tested baselines complicates the work of efficient sta-
tistical services that have recently entered the area-UN, World
Bank, Point Four and others. In Iran, where estimates of total
population fluctuate between 15-20 millions, regional sample sur-
veys instituted by Point Four can only limit the margins of error
by a million or two either way. Even the modem Lebanese, owing
to the Christian-Muslim ratio on which their internal governance
is balanced, refuse to permit a systematic census. Third, in these
circumstances the figures in Table 1 are only the best estimates that
can be drawn from the sources that merit consideration. Fourth,
these estimates refer to 1950, the year in which the bulk of our
interviewing was done. Since then, several important changes have
occurred— e.g., the extraordinary growth of mass media in Turkey,
which by now puts her clearly in the top rank on media produc-
tion and consumption. That Turkey has also, by now, survived the
three most democratic elections in Middle East history also sets
the framework.

Table I — Auditing Modernization (1 950)

Turkey

Lebanon

Egypt

Syria

Jordan

Iran

Population (in millions)

21

1.3

21

3

1.3

18

Urbanization (%):

Cities over 20,000

15

23

28

27

9

21

Cities over 100,000

8

16

19

21

0

13

Literacy (%)•

30

60

15

20

20

10

Voting (%)

36

11

-

26

14

Media Consumption
(per 1,000):

Daily Circulation

16

81

17

19

8

5

Radio Receivers

16

36

12

15

1

3

Cinema Seats

9

19

10

8

6

4

Media Production:

No. of Dailies

72

45

55

33

5

20

Transmitting Power (KW) 540

4.5

81.1

11.8

20.5

31.5

Feature Films per Yr.

15

-

45

1

-

1

Education (%)}

Elementary

7.6

11.5

6.6

9.0

6.1

3.8

Vocational

.20

.30

.15

.05

.02

.007

Teacher Training

.07

.06

.03

.002

.007

Universities

.09

.24

.18

.07

-

.02

* Indicet of literacy
of tjvoilcblo exflmofex.

vary widely, and

so do estimate,. Those

figure, approximate

the red let

„ ol f r °POf»ion of pupil, In tolol population (tince (her* ore no comporobl* fij <***

on lchool-oge populolisn).

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 87 )

If read with these cautions in mind, and with some knowledge
of the context, then Table 1 helps to clarify the Middle East land-
scape. Of our six countries, three are big and three are small. But
there are differences within each group. Only Turkey among the
big countries has its population fairly evenly distributed over its
total surface. Both Iran and Egypt comprise vast uninhabited
deserts-but Egypt is one of the world's most densely populated
countries, whereas Iran has room for growth. There is demographic
variation also in the smaller countries. Tiny Lebanon, least equipped
for internal expansion, has by emigration extended its human fron-
tier overseas and continues to grow. Syria, with the largest growth-
potential, gives fewer signs of development. The relationship be-
tween present boundaries and future frontiers sets style and tone
for persons living in these places: Lebanese feel free to go almost
anywhere; Syrians feel more obliged to stay where they are. These
matters go beyond societal audits to the type of data we shall pre-
sent next.

On our theory, let us recall, it would be misleading to consider
each index as an equally valid independent measure of moderniza-
tion. More important is the balance between indices and their joint
rates of growth in each country. The problem, for countries acquir-
ing mobility, is how to maintain stability. Excessive growth in one
phase of modem life, as compared with other related phases, often
does more harm than good. We shall see this illustrated by the
extraordinary rate of Egyptian urbanization. Responding to popu-
lation pressure rather than public policy, this movement off the
land has simply displaced a portion of rural misery into the cities
without stimulating growth in the skills required for true urbaniza-
tion. Similar imbalances overcrowd the metropoli in Syria and
Iran, while the towns fail to grow. The high figure for elementary
education in Syria also bespeaks an erratic leap rather than cumula-
tive movement. Outraged by French policy, newly-independent
Syria virtually destroyed the school system developed trader the
French mandate and rapidly installed its own. This involved a
large effort by the new government, but the figure reported in
1930 represented a take-over rather than a take-off. It can hardly
he maintained as a growth-rate through dispersed rural Syria with
vocational training at .05% and teacher training at .05%.

The Turkish figures show a better balance, representing a some-
what slower rate of growth, but growth that has been effectively

( ) Perspectives

maintained over three decades. It is, indeed, the remarkably sus-
tamed process of balanced growth that makes Turkey the 'area’s
outstanding example of modernization on our terms. As of 1950

7 dem ” Aan Tm **y on several ^es. Bu!
f ^ ., 195 1 ? tabl ® 15 * aken as one Point in a time-series extending
. e three decades 1927-57, then it becomes clear that Tur-
key is modernizing at a faster tempo and is therefore more dy-
namic. Moreover, Turkey has succeeded in keeping a more bal-
anced ratio among the rates of growth in all sectors, an indication
mat Turkey is more stable” which is supported by its extraor-
dinary development of participant politics since 1950.

, ® balanced modernization of Turkey is most clearly contrasted

with the erratic social change and political instability exhibited by
Sypt* i roughly the same total population, Egyptian urbaniza-
tion was just twice as large as Turkish in 1950. But a glance at
die relationship of urbanization to the other sectors shows why
this did not constitute modernization in Egypt. Whereas Turkey
\ gradually attained the critical minimum of 10% required for
6 ° ’ ka< d already passed the critical optimum of 25%.

oreover, able 1 shows a high degree of balance between ur-
amza on an other rates of growth in Turkey, as compared with
ex erne un a ance in the Egyptian matrix. An important index
3 ance urbanization is the growth of literacy. Since Egypt
s ice as ur an as Turkey it should, on our analysis, be some-
g an twice as literate. But its literacy was, in fact, half

rp 35 ur e y sin 1950— i.e., to match Turkey s urbanism-literacy
TBit/ W ° U re 9 u he over 400% more literates than it had.

shnwf^tti 1 ^ i° dle g * oba * ratio reported in Chapter II, which

ov cnv * a W 6n urkaniz ation exceeds 25% literacy should be
over ou% and growing.

social C ■ lmba ^ ances ten d to become circular and to accelerate
1950 Tn .i^* rather than self-sustaining growth. Since
swifter rai S ru erac y kas increased steadily and at an appropriately
plc e lfl than ,, urbanizali0n - Egyptian literacy has barefy kept
W capital S -H Ve In -L- P°P u ^ a bon and not at all with its overflow-
literates Thp 1 rf W . C are increasingly filled with homeless il-
merZell Ta ^ 1 tell the story. The 1*

produces almnci m6n ^ e ^ uca b°n means that each year Turkey

rate of population S Uarter ' miIIion m ore literates than Egypt, whose
Population increase would require that she quadruple her

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 89 )

annual production of literates merely to match the Turkish ratio.
The educational percentages further show that Turkey is producing
each year over a million more vocational graduates and teachers,
the human "multipliers” in diffusing literacy and other skills, whereas
Egypt’s ratio should double Turkey’s simply to service its urban
sector at the same level (and approximately redouble to service
its greater population increase).

Instead, we find Egypt outproducing Turkey educationally only
at the university level, which supplies relatively few skills that
are immediately utilized in rural Egypt and hence tends to increase
imbalance and instability. A similar imbalance, relative to the
literacy rates, appears in the Egyptian figures for media produc-
tion-consumption as compared with the Turkish data. (The ex-
traordinary figure of 540 KW transmitting power is erroneously
reported as Turkish; this represents a huge transmitter installed
by die United States, for its own use, at Istanbul. ) Most striking,
of course, are die comparative voting figures, which have diverged
even more sharply since 1950— with three genuinely participant na-
tional elections in Turkey as compared with one Egyptian plebiscite
designed to ratify die Nasser dictatorship.

In the case studies which follow we shall examine the sta-
tistical matrix for each country in detail. Here we wish to show
how the order in which the countries are ranked corresponds with
die attributes of the three personal types in each country.

3. Persons and Places:

Deviant Phases and Divergent Styles

Recall that modernization, in our view, is a secular trend uni-
lateral in direction— from traditional to participant lifeways. This
common process entails certain important regularities of social
change tiiroughout die Middle East But there are national devia-
tions because the individual countries are passing through different
phases at a particular period of time. By making explicit the regu-
larities we document the process; by noting the deviations we
locate each country in its proper phase. The divergent behavioral
styles associated with these deviant national phases reveal the
impact of places on persons.

Of our six countries, then, Lebanon started earliest and had

( 90 ) Perspectives

reached the most advanced stage by 1950. Turkey, showing more
rapid and comprehensive modernization over the past three decades,
has by 1958 overtaken Lebanon in many sectors. Jordan and Iran
are the least modem countries. Jordan in 1950 was a tiny desert
shaykhdom that had just been galvanized by the acquisition of
new territory and a mass of Palestinian refugees, twice as numer-
ous as the indigenous Trans] ordanians and much more modem in
every way. (This huge refugee element explains the numerous
deviations in the “national profile” of Jordan.) Iran, large and
populous, was struggling to awaken from the deep sleep of cen-
turies under the impetus of Mossadegh and the oil nationalization.
Syria and Egypt are the complex intermediate cases. Syria exhibits
a top-heavy elite in an underpopulated, still quite agrarian, land
with inadequate resources. Egypt, with a rich agricultural produc-
tion sustaining one of the world’s most overpopulated areas, was
still governed by Farouk in 1950. Since then, under military dic-
tatorship, it has revived an historical claim to Arab leadership.
This claim has diverted the new Egyptian elite from domestic mod-
ernization into a political arena strained by competing claims
against its own large ambitions.

To make this ranking of countries plain, the rows of all tables
are arranged in decreasing order of modernism— Turkey and
Lebanon at the top, Egypt and Syria in the middle, Jordan and
Iran at the bottom. The types are also ordered by degree of mod-
ernism— Traditional at the left, Transitional in the middle, Modem
at the right. Where an index of modernization is being tested, the
coefficients should increase from top to bottom and from left to
right— the lowest appearing at bottom left and the highest at top
right. The paradigm for such distributions is:

Turkey

Lebanon

Egypt

Syria

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

HIGH

Jordan

The Passing of Traditional Society : A Survey ( 91 )

We begin with the array of sociological attributes, by type
and country, presented in Table 2. These data document the gen-
eralization, for our sample, that modernizing Middle Easterners
in 1950 tended to be young unmarried males, relatively well-off,
and recruited among minority groups— in higher proportions than
in the total population. (In addition to such diverse Christian
minorities as Copts, Greeks, Armenians, this generalization includes
also the Druzes and Jews. But as the two latter groups tend not
to reveal their religion. Table 2 counts only declared Christians. )

As these data compare only differences between the types in
each country (not comparable samples between countries), we
expect the numbers to increase horizontally within each country
but not vertically between countries. The horizontal increase is
quite regular and in some cases dramatic— e.g., the clear majorities
registered for males in all countries, and for young unmarried
males in the four Arab countries. Females appeared more fre-
quently as Modems in countries where the Sunni branch of Islam
does not dominate the social order and where there are many
Christian Modems. In Egypt and Syria, with many Christian
Modems, the Sunni Muslims do dominate. In Turkey, where the
Christians are all Modem ( though greatly reduced in number
since expulsion of the Greeks ) and where Muslims are Sunni, the
high proportion of women as Modems is due to Atatiirk's separation
of church and state three decades ago, together with his deliberate
policy of coeducation and “lifting the veil.” Sunni Islam, in the
absence of a countervailing Christian influence, has tended to keep
women in a traditional style of life.

On one point, data in Table 2 do show an important deviation.
This is in the final column giving the "average of differences” be-
tween the three types in each country. The two lowest countries
show differences approximately equal to those for the two highest
countries. This requires a corollary of our hypothesis that the
smaller tire differences between the types the more stable the
country. The capacity to maintain stability while modernizing at a
rapid rate is shown only by Turkey and Lebanon. In Jordan and
Iran, where modernization was barely visible in 1950, the small
differences doubtless reflect the persistence of traditional relation-
ships for most people. The likelihood is that, in 1958, post-British
Jordan and post-Mossadegh Iran show the impact of moderniza-
tion by larger differences between the types than existed in 1950.

Perspectives

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The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 93 )

Especially in Jordan, where the highly modernized Palestinian
refugees had barely begun to disrupt traditional relationships in
1950, the subsequent impact of their activities is likely to be visible
in 1958.

A striking illustration of the hypothesis is the far greater dis-
tance between die types in Egypt and Syria. That these two acute
"trouble spots” are the least stable lands in the Middle East is
shown by every test in our battery— as by common observation.
Why they have been so deeply shaken by the crisis of modemiza-
iton is indicated by the enormous cleavages between the divergent
styles of life. In this context, other items in Table 2 become salient.
We note, for example, that Egypt shows about the lowest propor-
tion of females among its Moderns but very much the highest
proportion among its Transitionals. No artifact of our sampling
procedure alone could explain this difference between 16% and
61%. A more likely explanation is the unusual sequence of educa-
tional opportunities and vocational obstacles which shape the life-
history of many Egyptian women. The point is clarified by com-
parison with die most modem and least modem countries. In
Turkey, where women who receive education are also permitted
(indeed encouraged) to take jobs, they tend to develop a consistent
Modem style. In Iran, where most women receive neither educa-
tion nor employment, they remain quite Traditional in their ways.
In Egypt, many women receive education but then are blocked
by tradition from mobility and vocational opportunities. It is still
"unseemly” for a woman, outside certain sections of Cairo, to be
seen alone in a public place where men are admitted— whether it
be a movie or a museum. Accordingly, Egyptian women with some
education but few outlets tend to cluster in the Transitional group
—no longer quite Traditional, but not yet Modem. This frustrating
experience may explain the growth of Egyptian feminist move-
ments, such as that led by Dr. Doria Shafaq, and their increasing
claim on public attention during the past few years..

The deviant case of Egyptian women throws light on the posi-
tion of Transitionals throughout the Middle East. Our general
proposition that Transitionals normally occupy an intermediate
position on the indices of modernism, between the Traditionals
and the Modems, is heavily documented in the case studies. One
qualification has already been stated: in more dynamic countries
(those modernizing more rapidly) Transitional scores will tend

( 94 ) Perspectives

to be closer to Modem scores. Two further corollaries appear to
be valid: in more traditional (less dynamic) countries Transitional
scores will tend to be closer to Traditional scores; and finally, in
intermediate countries Transitional scores will show more extreme
fluctuations between the polar types from one index to another.

The central role of the Transitional hinges, as we have seen,
upon his mobility. The Transitionals are, literally, the men-in-
motion of the Middle East. This is sometimes obscured in the case
studies which, designed to gauge the degree of modernism achieved
in 1950, deal with urbanization as the proportion of people living
in cities at that time. This static measure naturally shows the highest
proportion of urbanites among the Modems, most of whom were
bom in cities. But the genuinely mobile persons are those who,
having been bom in rural places, moved to cities in their own
lifetime. To compare our respondents on this test, we collated all
answers to the questions where they had grown up and where
they were living today. Those who had moved to a larger place
or to a different province than their birthplace were classified as
“mobile,” with the results shown in Table 3.

Table 3 — Mobility by Type and Country

Turkey

Lebanon

Egypt

Syria

Jordan

Iran

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

11%

20 %

8%

9

11

10

1

17

5

5

7

4

16

10

10

2

7

10

Total

39 %

30

23

16

36

19

Among the living generation, Transitionals tend to he c
most mobile. Turkish mobility is highest across the board, wi
the Turkish Transitionals distinctly ahead of their peers elsewhere.
Noteworthy, in both Turkey and Lebanon, is the high mom t)’
achieved by the Traditionals as well— which gives these two coun-
tries a more balanced distribution between the three types, at a
high level of mobility, than is found elsewhere. In Egypt, frequent
movement among Transitionals is accompanied by virtually n°
mobility among Traditionals. (The imbalance is expressed by the
sum of percentage differences between the three types— 32 ir
Egypt as compared with 24 in Turkey and 4 in Lebanon.) h
Syria and Iran, mobility is extremely low. and erratically distributee

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 93 )

among the three types. Iran is the one country in which Transi-
b'onals score lower than Modems, for in 1950 Iran a Transitional
type had barely begun to emerge. The Jordan mobility profile de-
viates from all regularities owing to the Palestinian refugees, whose
“mobility” was in fact a forced migration after the 1948 war with
Israel.

One important correlate of mobility, for this study, is its tend-
ency to increase media exposure, We have already seen that media
exposure increases with modernity by types. Here we wanted a
comparative measure to see whether mobility and media exposure
go together by countries. We formed a weighted index of expo-
sure to each of the media-e.g., daily newspaper reading scored
4, several times weekly scored 3, once weekly scored 2, less than
weekly scored 1, and no reading at all scored 0. Combined with
similar weights for radio-listening and movie-going, this gave us
an index of media exposure which ranked individuals on a scale
from 0 to 12. The proportion of high scorers (over 10 units) in the
total sample for each country is reported in Table 4.

Table 4 — High Media Exposure by Countries

Turkey

35%

Lebanon

29

Egypt

22

Syria

23

Jordan

29

Iran

13

The rank-order of the countries on media exposure corresponds
perfectly with its mobility profile. The Turkish lead in media con-
sumption, as in mobility, was already substantial in 1950. Even
the usual deviation caused by the refugees in Jordan corresponds
with its deviation on mobility. The attitudinal element which links
mobility and media so closely is shown in Table 5 below. In the
Middle East, the media are still so new that their title to existence
is a highly controversial matter. Many respondents in each coun-
try, especially among the Traditionals who had never been ex-
posed to them, regarded radio as a “devil’s box” and movies as
sinful. Among the Arabs, who are more respectful than Turks and
Iranians toward the Islamic injunction against pictorial repre-
sentation of human beings, there is also a wider malaise about the
disruptive impact of the media upon their chances of salvation.

( ) Perspectives

Transjordanians even attribute t he ills that befell the Palestinian
refugees to Gods wrath over their consorting with these new
fangled media. ‘Look at the Palestinians/’ said one Transjordanian
respondent, “they listened to the radio and God destroyed them”

at^7 Ur S * “ 0f J° rdan ’ WC S “ l00lc more dose] y at thes'e

attitudes. Here we wish to compare their distribution axnon K the

Transitional m the four Arab countries (the questions asked in
urkey and Iran are not directly comparable). Accordingly, Table
reports the proportion of Transitionals in each country who-
w len asked what they thought of newspapers, radio, movies-ex-
pressed approval of these media.

Table 5— Media Approval among Transitionals

Lebanon

Egypf

Syria

Jordan

newspapers

70%

44

35

58

Radio

89%

46

35

82

Movies

85%

55

42

47

e Transitionals approve of the media in proportions corre-
spon ng to their mobility. In Lebanon, where the young Transi-
lona s already use their media-exposure as a wedge into the trad i-
ona structures of power and prestige, approval is highest for
a me a. (The lesser approval of newspapers, we shall see in the
e an ? n c “ a P ter > was mainly a reaction against recent trends in
e emit press.) In Egypt and Syria, media approval is generally

■FV? f> V1 1 mov * es dle most favored. This preference, reflecting
j growing production of feature films, has probably in-
crease its lead since 1950. In Jordan, the Palestinian refugees
. most of the newspapers available to them (con-

6 y non-refugee editorial policies) and had few opportunities
„ ^ V1 . es ' 'P leir ex freme preference for radio reflected the

of n 3 1 m re ^ u § ee cam P s of radio receivers, their only channel
of news from other sources (e.g., Cairo).

enlarorpc Im f Jortance °f m edia exposure, in our theory, is that it
21 £ L PeTSOnS ^ 0f * e world (“opinion range”) by in-
tions ima S ine h ™self in new and strange situa-

proi ective We tested empathy by our battery of

type and ^ res P ondents rank-ordered themselves by

To see mor j 111 P er f ec t correspondence with our hypothesis.

c ose y ie connection between empathy and media

T he Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 97 )

attitudes, we classified all responses to the question “If you were
made editor of a newspaper, what kind of a paper would you run?’'
Underlying the variety of responses, there was a certain cluster of
attitudes that came closest to the approved modem attitude. This
stressed “independence, impartiality, objectivity” as primary at-
tributes of newspapers. We then tabulated the proportion of re-
spondents, by type and country, who stressed these three attributes.
The results, which index the incorporation of modem press stand-
ards, are shown in Table 6.

Table 6 — Empathy to Modern Press Standards

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

Turkey

42%

55%

59%

Lebanon

33

50

33

Egypt

19

42

36

Syria

26

40

35

Jordan

15

57

38

Iran

6

18

26

The distribution shows a consistently higher proportion of Turks
across the three types. In both of the advanced countries, Turkey
and Lebanon, it is among the newly-participant Transitionals and
many Traditional that the importance of an “independent, impar-
tial, objective” press has been widely diffused. (The Lebanese
Modems were preoccupied by recent unpopular trends in the
Beirut press. } In Egypt, Syria, Jordan the lower regard for modem
press standards among the Modems seems related to a more pro-
found malaise. In these countries, a substantial segment of Modems
are the radical young intelligentsia dedicated to deep and rapid
social change. The newspapers they read in 1950 were, by and
large, controlled by the ruling elite— often liberals of I9th century
vintage— who appeared to the young radicals as defenders of their
vested interests. Counter-elite attacks since 1950 have transformed
tin’s situation. It is likely that in 1958 many more Modems in
Egypt and Syria, now satisfied with the radical line taken by their
press, would give more attention to press standards than when
they were preoccupied by acute issues of press ideology.

But our data refer to 1950 and our focus is on the Transitionals.
That so many could imagine themselves in the strange role of
newspaper editors, and that their imaginings took so modem a
form, indicates the spread of empathy among them. The enlarging

( 98 ) Perspectives

of perspectives, which accompanies empathy, is indicated by the
content of their news interests. Each respondent was asked to recall
the last item of news he had received. A person’s answer to such
a question usually reflects the habitual “screen” of perception and
memory through which he filters incoming information. We classi-
fied the news items recalled by tire respondents in categories show-
ing an increasing range of news interest: personal, family, com-
munity, national, international. The proportions recalling interna-
tional news are reported in Table 7.

Table 7 — News Range: Recall of International Items

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

Turkey

81%

64%

W*

eg

CO

Lebanon

39

54

69

Egypt

35

40

59

Syria*

31

45

58

Jordan*

29

39

62

* Refugee respondents in Syria and Jordan recalled mainly Items deal-
ing with Palestine. Following their own perspective, we classified such
items as home rather than international news for these groups. Iran is not
Included because no directly comparable question was asked there.

This distribution corresponds to our paradigm, rising steadily
from left to right and from top to bottom. The principal deviation
—the extremely high proportion of Turkish Traditionals recalling
international news— turned out to reflect a widespread (and rather
single-minded) popular interest in the Korean War, to which a,
Turkish brigade had just been committed with immense publicity
through all news media. Hence, this constitutes a special case or,
rather than an exception to, the regular increase of interest in
international news from Traditional to Modem types and from
less to more advanced countries.

Empathy shows in the “news range” of an individual because
this illustrates his interest in matters beyond his immediate per-
sonal and local concerns— in matters which, as Traditionals put it,
are none of his business. Empathy shows as well in a persons
opinion range”— his capacity to form and express views on a
variety of matters which are also, in the Traditional’s sense, not
directly his business. To test this, we formed an Opinion Index by
drawing eleven questions from different sections of the interview
bearing on different matters of large public importance. By W s
answers to these questions, each respondent revealed the number

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 99 )

and variety of matters on which he had opinions. Each cogent
answer was scored 1, each "no opinion” was scored 0. The maximum
possible score per, respondent was thus 11 units. The average score
for each type in each country was then computed, with results
shown in Table 8.

Table 8 — Opinion Range (Index Units)

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

Turkey

6.0

7.9

8.2

Lebanon

6.2

7.0

8.0

Egypt

4.3

6.0

7.5

Syria

6.6

7.6

8.0

Jordan

<5.3

8.0

8.0

Iran

4.1

5.6

7.8

In such a scoring procedure, small variations register large
differences. The .7 lead of the Turkish over Egyptian Modems, for
example, signifies that the same number of Turks gave about 100
more answers out of a possible total of 1353 answers. The con-
sistent increases in opinion range by type and country (with some-
what lower scores than expected in Egypt) thus conform to our
paradigm. As individuals and their nations move toward modernity,
a systematic process of opinion-formation comes into play. The
growth of a Pubh'c Opinion becomes manifest as more and more
people increase their news and opinion range— the number and
variety of public matters on which, though none of their personal
business, they show interest and express opinions.

A Pubh'c Opinion grows out of the expectation that many people
will have views on pubh'c issues; it is sustained by the reciprocal
expectation that what people think about such issues will make a
difference in their solution. This structure of reciprocal expectations
—that people will have opinions and that their opinions will count
—requires a widespread sense of deference toward vox populi.
Individuals must believe that their own opinions combine with the
opinions of others to express a “popular will,” which is a major
channel of access from the governed to their government. It is not
necessary to believe that the will of the governed must always be
heeded. But it must always be heard and sometimes be heeded.

To see how widely these reciprocal expectations had spread
among Middle East respondents, we collated their answers to two
questions. One asked them to name the biggest problem facing

( 100 ) Perspectives

them as individuals and facing their nation. Subsequently, they
were asked what they could do to help solve these problems. Of
those who said they could do nothing, some gave “objective”
reasons (e.g., “the nature of the problem” or “no solution is pos-
sible”); the others cited “personal” impotency (e.g., their inability
“to go against religion or fate”). The proportions citing personal
impotency are given in Table 9.

Table 9 — Personal Impotency

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

Turkey

35%

33%

33%

Lebanon

51

35

40

Egypt

63

73

51

Syria

90

92

37

Jordan

52

57

45

Iran

63

100

72

The sense of personal impotency increases fairly steadily, within
each type, as the scale descends from most to least modem coun-
tries. (One discounts, as usual, for the Palestinian refugees in
Jordan.) This is particularly marked among the Transitionals, for
their steady increase by countries goes with extreme fluctuations
by types within each country. In tire advanced countries, the
Transitionals are closer to the Moderns, as they should be on such
a basic self-image as personal impotency. In Turkey, indeed, the
Transitionals are identical with the Modems; there die Transition-
als are already men-on-the-move, witii a relatively developed sense
of self-confidence. In the less advanced countries, the Transitionals
are closer to the Traditionals and feel themselves to be even more
impotent about their private and public problems. The Egyptian
Transitionals, with their large component of frustrated females,
score markedly higher on impotency dian the Traditionals. They,
and their Transitional counterparts in Syria, lag far behind the
aggressive young Modems who, less constricted by fears of im-
potency, have made postwar politics in both countries so full of
alarums and excursions.'

These results point to quite basic differences in die personal
meaning of modernization', at different phases of the process. When
persons of the same type differ so sharply on their capacity to cope
with their environment, then the differences in dieir environment
are likely to be large. Since participation is based on the expecta-

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 101 )

Ho n that what one says and does will matter in the world, the
sense of personal impotency indicates the absence of a basic re-
quirement for participation. The distribution in Table 9 shows
what a difference it makes to persons of each type whether they
live in a society that is opening even if not yet open, advancing
even if not yet very far advanced, adaptive to new people in new
roles.

Most of all does their societal setting matter to the Transitionals.
They are the men-in-motion who have made a heavy psychic in-
vestment in social change; but where they can go, how far and how
fast, is limited by the availability of channels and adaptability
of institutions in their society. This would explain why Transitionals
in modernizing Turkey and Lebanon feel themselves to be just as
potent as their most modem compatriots, whereas in distraught
Egypt and Syria they feel even less potent than the Traditionals.
Further, personal impotency is perceived by Traditionals as their
natural role of ancient acquiescence. But for Transitionals, with
their new aspirations, the old passivity is experienced as frustrating
and the sense of impotency causes deep unhappiness.

This brings our scrutiny of divergent personal style to the
"ultimate” question of happiness. We have little to report on any
question regarded as ultimate, but the interview schedule did pose
two questions that show us how happiness was distributed, by
type and country, among the respondents. The first question asked
each respondent whether he was happy or unhappy (“fairly” or
"very") with his life. Very many didn’t know. Of those who did
know, the Modems were the happiest type in each country, and
in all types the Turks were the happiest country. The proportions
declaring themselves “fairly unhappy” or “very unhappy” are
given, in Table 10, in order to show next the reasons for un-
happiness.

An important result of the distribution is the showing that
Traditionals consistently register the most unhappiness in all
countries. It must surely interest observers who regret the passing
of traditional society from the Middle East to note that those who
embody tradition are most unhappy while those seeking to forsake
it become increasingly happy in the measure that they succeed.
The Modems are happiest except in the two most traditional
societies, Jordan and Iran, which provide them with few satisfac-
tions. The Traditionals are happiest in the chaotic intermediate

( 102 ) Perspectives

countries, Egypt and Syria, which provide them with few oppor-
tunities to change their ways.

On the basic question of happiness, then, our paradigm and
its corollaries are nicely illustrated. Unhappiness decreases from
left to right and from top to bottom, with deviations where they
should be on such a question. Transitionals, in the two modernizing
countries, are closer to the Modems. In the other four countries,
they are closer to the Traditionals. (Their erratic position in the
two lowest countries is due to the extreme unhappiness of the
Moderns— in Jordan, over their actual displacement from Palestine;
in Iran, over their threatened displacement by Mossadegh.)

Table 10 — Unhappiness

Traditional

Transitional

Modern

Turkey

29%

17%

14%

Lebanon

43

18

18

Egypt

40

41

19

Syria

41

40

13

Jordan

52

42

54

Iran

52

33

42

It seems reasonable to suppose that unhappiness distributes
according to our paradigm because it is associated with other
attributes that have shown a similar distribution. Happiness, like
these other attributes, seems to express a ratio between desires
and satisfactions for persons of each type in different settings. In
Turkey and Lebanon, where modernization has opened enough
channels and adapted enough institutions to provide a good ratio
of satisfactions to desires, happiness is evenly distributed at a high
level among the modernizing persons because they tend to get
what they want. In Egypt and Syria, individual aspirations exceed
social capacity to provide satisfactions— so that happiness is more
common among the Modems, who already have what they want.
But Transitionals, who want what they cannot readily get, are
quite unhappy.

Unhappiness is distributed in close proximity to the sense of
impotency and the lack of empathy. It seems clear why this should
be so. Confidence in ones capacity to solve the private and public
problems he considers most important is a liberating expectation.
It heightens euphoria and stimulates innovation-the empathic
awareness of “variousness and possibility” which Lionel Trilling

The Passing af Traditional Society: A Survey ( 103 )

finds in the distinctively modem liberal imagination. The reverse
conditions spread dysphoria. The sense of impotency tends to
diminish empathy and constrict imagination. Why dream of a
better life when one is powerless to do anything to make it come
true? It appears that the widespread unhappiness among Tran-
sitionals in Egypt and Syria expresses the disjunction, in this sense,
between their empathy and their impotency. They have acquired
the personal dreams but they feel impotent to perform the social
deeds. This syndrome may explain the unstable, and occasionally
explosive, quality of public life in those countries. Frustration of
the quest for a more satisfying life can produce chronic melancholy
and acute rages.

Connections of this order, between private and public styles
of life, require detailed exploration in each country. Comparative
analysis has shown us the regularities that occur as different types
of Middle Easterners in different countries respond to the common
compulsions of modernization. The interaction between individual
personality and social setting, under these common compulsions,
produces a remarkable array of regularities on such apparently
diverse matters as mobility, media exposure, media approval,
empathy, news range, opinion range, self-confidence (personal
potency) and happiness. These attitudinal and behavioral regu-
larities show how individuals in the Middle East lands adapt to
their environment. Now we wish to investigate the different en-
vironments with which individuals living in the various countries
are confronted. For this purpose we turn from comparative analysis
to the method of case studies.

4. The Cases in Hand

The case studies stress the distinctive features of each Middle
Eastern country. In each country, that aspect of modernization
which illustrates its salient current problems is discussed. While we
look for the connections between communication, economic, and
political behavior in each country, the specific topics vary from
one country to another. In Turkey and Lebanon we focus on
sociology' of communication, in Egypt and Syria on politics. By
following die "natural contour” of current events, we become in-
volved in highly controversial issues. Partisan to modernization,
our own judgment on some of these issues is made apparent to the

( 104 ) Perspectives

reader. But the data are sufficiently abundant that the reader can
form his own independent, and quite contrary, judgments.

The case studies aim at depicting more vividly the particular
environment which surrounds people living in each country. Instead
of repeating parallel results obtained on the same rigidly applied
indices in case after case, we provide the reader with some fresh
material on each country. The danger is that the abundance of
particularities will obscure some essential regularities. It may help
the reader to perceive the connections between cases, if he is
alerted in advance to the procedures used.

We were able to take considerable latitude in defining the
types in each country because our typology is basically a correla-
tional matrix. This means, as already shown, that one can legiti-
mately start with any item in the matrix and use it as a base line from
which to discuss any other item in the matrix. It is even permissible
to use several of the items to represent the matrix as a whole—
where the coefficients of multiple correlation obtained from em-
pirical data showed these items to have a “systematic” relationship
among different individuals, from different countries, responding
to a diversified battery of questions.

The reader will recall that all respondents were classified as
Modems, Transitionals or Traditionals by their score on the opin-
ion range. Subsequently, high correlations were established between
these scores and those on urbanization, literacy, media participation
and empathy. This enabled us to speak of Moderns with respect to
any of these items or all of them together. A formal justification
for this procedure is presented in Appendix C, where a latent
structure analysis shows more rigorously the consistency of the
typological patterns denoting different “styles of life.” This entitles
us to refer to Modems in one place as those scoring high on the
opinion range; in another place as those scoring high on empathy;
in still other places as those who are urban, literate, and media
participant. Where necessary to avoid confusion, we indicate the
specific referent of the terms Modem, Transitional and Traditional.
Here we simply alert the reader to the logic which permits us
to vary these references so freely.

Our formal title to these variations would avail us little without
the rich and varied data provided by the Bureau’s multidimen-
sional interview schedule. This very open questionnaire, which is
reproduced in full at Appendix A, departed from the restrictive

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 103 )

hypothesis-test mold in order to provide subsequent analysts with
opportunities for a "fishing expedition.” An open questionnaire,
which draws upon the researchers’ own empathy for what is pos-
sible and what is probable in a new and strange area, enables them
to learn many valuable things which in advance they could not
even know that they would want to know. In this respect, the
Bureau questionnaire can serve as a model for future efforts to
apply modem American research procedures in the less developed
areas of the world.

Wc begin with Turkey as the area’s most impressive example
of modernization— impressive in that it has steadily evolved, and
continues to evolve, along lines laid down by a revolutionary dic-
tator over three decades ago. Atatiirk’s genius as a social planner
was to see "economic development” within a comprehensive be-
havioral matrix. To raise industrial production, Atatiirk began by
simplifying the national language, separating religion, installing
schools, building roads, creating cities. By such institutional in-
novations he undermined the props of mral isolation and encour-
aged traditional Anatolians to come into the modem world. He
degraded the fez and the veil— symbols of traditional demeanor—
and publicized his own portrait in formal Western attire. He in-
vented Halk-evleri (Peoples’ Houses) and put radios in them so
that people could receive “the news” and discuss it. (That he
decided what was news and what were appropriate opinions irri-
tated some observers, but this diminished as he silenced some and
o fliers noticed that he was usually right.) Within this matrix of
behavioral and institutional innovations, Atatiirk also built cement
factories and initiated a sturdy republic. Economic development
and political modernization thus were located in a psychosocial
setting that made possible the spread of a genuinely participant
style of life.

The story of Turkey under Atatiirk is so striking a case of
mobility wedded with stability that we take a separate chapter to
describe it. Chapter IV gives special attention to the "communica-
tion revolution” initiated by Atatiirk— its antecedents and its con-
sequences. In chapter V, we report the attitudinal posture of Ata-
tiirk’s republic as revealed by our interviews in 1950— indicating,
where possible, the continuing modernization that has occurred
since the survey was made.

We then report on the four Arab countries, taken in the order

( 106 ) Perspectives

of their modernity. Chapter VI deals with Lebanon, whose long
history of modernization shows in the locus of its current issues.
Politics has been reduced to questions of program rather than
principle. Even the potentially explosive issue of the Christian-
Muslim ratio (which would torpedo any government in Egypt
and Syria) has been managed by reasonable continence and judi-
cious compromise. Lebanon’s are the modem problems-salient
since the 19th century— of capital investment, the younger genera-
tion, the emancipation of women. Accordingly, we give special
attention to these problems in the case study of Lebanon.

We next turn to the two intermediate countries, Egypt and
Syria. Theirs are the 17th century problems of mobility and ur-
banization, capital formation and industrialization, social ration-
ality and the idea of a public policy. But these problems are altered
by their appearance in the 20th century. Egypt, in 1950 still gov-
erned by Farouk, showed signs of that ambivalence among the
elite which subordinates any consistent line of public policy to the
need for private gratifications. This has since evolved into fire
“Nasser syndrome,” which we describe in chapter VII. Syria, with
a real growth-potential that still remains unused, exhibited in 1950
the propensity for extremist politics which since has produced the
series of coups d’etat that made her, by 1958, the main outpost
of Soviet influence in the Middle East. There is an embarrassing
look of hindsight in these two case studies now that Nasser rules
both lands in a United Arab Republic. But both chapters were
drafted in 1954, when Naguib ruled Egypt and Shishakli ruled
Syria. Our subsequent revisions have incorporated no up-to-date
references to Colonel Serraj, whose portrait fits into the gallery of
“Young Effendis” in chapter VIII. If we mention that the final
sentence on Syria (“In the current situation, extremists can take
heart”) was written in 1954, it is not to establish ourselves as
prophets but to indicate that there may be some predictive power
in the data we are reporting.

We turn, in chapter IX, to Jordan. This is a very special case
—a desert shaykhdom of Beduin tribesmen, under British dominion,
newly overrun in 1950 by a horde of Palestinian refugees twice as
numerous and much more modernized than themselves. Our
preceding account of Middle Eastern regularities has shown that
one such regularity is the phrase “with the usual exception of the
Palestinian refugees.” The most modem subpopulation of Muslim

The Passing of Traditional Society: A Survey ( 107 )

Arabs is living in the least modem country of Muslim Arabs in our
survey. The plain consequence, of course, is that the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan constitutes not a nation in any recognizable
sense, but a nominal state with two substantial bodies of popula-
tion. Although both are Muslim Arabs, this is a case of "culture
contact” between peoples who are virtually foreign to each other.
Our discussion of Jordan is organized around this most salient
of current problems in the Middle East

Our final case study deals with Iran— Muslim but not Sunni,
on the margins of the Middle East but not Arab. Like the Turks,
the Persians once directed a great empire, but so long before the
Ottomans that their administrative skills were largely dissipated.
Reza Shah was no Atatiirk, among other reasons, because he lacked
the corps of skilled lieutenants to instrument a modernizing pro-
gram of social action. Iran has been adrift upon the sea of world
politics; and world politics in 1950— as since then— has been bi-
polarized between Washington and Moscow. The impact of bi-
polarization has shaped the recent history of the Middle East in
ways that cannot be explained purely by psychosocial regularities
and secular trends. The Middle East will be different, for decades
to come, because its dynamic phase of modernization coincided
with the Cold War. Policies have prevailed that would otherwise
have failed; people have gained who would otherwise have lost
(or been obliged to place their bets differently). No country in
our survey exhibits the Cold War impact so clearly as Iran in
1950; accordingly our chapter on Iran is organized around this
disputatious theme. With Iran we conclude the case studies, to
which we now turn.

The New Turks

IV.

Turkey: From the Past

"Our enemies make us laugh; our friends make us
cry!”

— Turkish Proverb

"For centuries, until the current era, nothing new
and very little good happened to the masses."

— D. E. Webster

TURKEY is not yet a Modem society in our sense; but
it is no longer a Traditional society in any sense. The Muslim Insti-
tution has been separated from the secular state. Though Koranic
codes are still heard in the mosque, a Constitution now is law in
the land. Where once a Sultan reigned, a president now governs.
The Republic has ceded a large domain to individual reflection
and majority rule. The women of Turkey have removed the veil;
the men have laid aside the fez. The children now grow up in
skirts and trousers instead of sholvars, and go to schools where
they no longer memorize the Koran but instead learn to read and
write. To facilitate the modem miracle of free public education,
die antique Arabic orthography was replaced by the simpler West-
ern script.

These great deeds constitute a unique "revolution” in the series
that followed World War I— one which has neither revised its
goals nor lost its dynamism. Its momentum survived the reversal
of Atatiirk’s party in the 1950 election. Indeed the added stimulus
of a new party come to power, unexpectedly and for the first time,
released a great burst of energy into the channels of social change.
Within a year, die spectacular road-building program was under
way, a modem Turkish brigade was fighting in Korea, and con-
struction of the largest radio transmitter on the Eurasian continent

( 111 )

( 112 ) The Nev) Turks

was started in Istanbul. This sequence of events underscores the
theme of our inquiry— the “systemic” role of communication in
modernization.

It was Atatiirk’s sustained perception of the behavioral unity
needed for the variegated modem style of life that gave to his revo-
lution its special character. Challenging Sumners dictum that
“stateways cannot change folkways,” Atatiirk aimed at nothing
less than reshaping a traditionalized society by transforming the
daily deeds and desires of the people— first the new elite, then the
ancient mass. From the very start, Atatiirk preoccupied himself
with details of deportment that seemed picayune to his more rigidly
ideological contemporaries leading the revolutions that erupted
throughout Europe at this epoch. His model was the “modem West-
ern style” and his method was the production of “new Turks.”

Of special relevance to the continuity of the revolution Ata-
tiirk initiated is the role he assigned to communication. To change
the thoughtways of a people, Atatiirk perceived that he must trans-
form the existing network into a system of mass communication.
The need was easier seen than satisfied. In a society whose illiter-
ates exceeded 90% of the population, the job had to be done for
the long run and from the very bottom. Accordingly, Atatiirk
began with his famous decree changing the orthography of the
Turkish language.

To undermine the “oriental mentality” which interdicted repub-
lican development, Atatiirk set out to promote mass literacy. For
this a more efficient instrument than Arabic script was needed,
so Atatiirk decreed it into existence. But if stateways do change
folkways, they do so only gradually in the course of time. Hence,
while his New Turks were laboriously acquiring the written word,
Atatiirk went to them with a vigorous campaign by the spoken
word. He created throughout the barren villages of Anatolia the
network of Halk-evleri (People’s Houses) which served as message
centers for transmission of the new republican mystique, via Party
directives, to the unlettered masses of rural Turkey. Next he put
radio receivers into these Halk-evleri so that the villagers might
receive the new word directly from its source.

As the “communication revolution” pursued its course, early
enthusiasm encountered later currents of frustration. In 1949
M. W. Thornburg, reviewing the Turkish economy, raised the ques-
tion: “Why does a popular revolution, after nearly a quarter cen-

Turkey: From the Past ( 113 )

tury of glamorous successes, leave most of the people— perhaps 18
out of the 20 million— almost where they were before?” 1 By 1949
the Revolution had run its course for exactly a quarter-century.
Compared with the modem Western countries Atatiirk admired,
Turkey had a long way to go. But compared with the situation
Atatiirk inherited in 1924, great strides had been made. The pic-
ture Thornburg presented as an impasse in 1949 was unduly somber.
A resume of the communication situation in traditional Turkey
shows that the quarter-century's achievements now appear as a
midpassage.

1. The Ottoman Context

The Ottoman Imperium comprised not merely a variety of
illiterate populations but an anti-literate elite, who regulated the
daily round of public life by maintaining exclusive control over
key points of contact between individuals and their larger environ-
ment In 1554, Oghier Ghiselin de Busbecq, imperial ambassador
at Constantinople, wrote of tire Turks:

They have never been able to bring themselves to print books and
set up public docks. They hold that their scriptures would no longer be
scriptures if they were printed; and if they established public clocks,
they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites
would suffer diminution. 2

Oral communication was the rule under the Ottoman dispen-
sation. “The news” was carried from one locality to another by
public criers, itinerant preachers, and merchant caravans; it was
then orally relayed through the corresponding milieux of each
locality, such as the coffee house, the mosque, the market place
and caravansery. The contents of “the news” reflected the utter
dependence of the populace upon a remote center. According to
Ahmed Emin Yalman:

Thus were made public government laws, regulations, and orders,
military news, the appointment of a new governor, dates of religious
festivals, funerals of prominent people, arrival or departure of caravans
and ships. 3

Such a communication structure served as an administrative tech-
nique of social control, not as an instrument for shaping an en-
lightened public opinion. For, in truth, public opinion in the mod-

The Neto Turks

( 114 )

em construction was non-existent in the Ottoman system. Com-
munications were designed not to enlighten and persuade opinion,
but to prepare and prescribe behavior. The integration of this
communication structure into the general system of Ottoman ad-
ministration is indicated by the fact that the public criers were not
used for official announcements to non-Muslims. In this case the
communal heads of the millets (the special Ottoman institution
for religious minorities) were summoned to receive the news in
behalf of their constituencies. In the Ottoman system it was
natural that the message-intermediary should also be the power-
intermediary . 4

Such a network of oral communications had to be ramified.
Proclamation of government and commercial notices was the special
task of tlie dellal (town crier ). 5 Religious and police announce-
ments were made by the hekci baba— a, personage of note who
served as water-carrier by day and watchman by night. Attached
to his district police station, he would beat drums and announce
the holy month of Ramadan or any other religious bayrani (holi-
day) and would give warning of a fire in the district. The Ottoman
system was persistent. The author of a current biography recalls
how, as a youth in Istanbul, he would awaken to hear the night
cries of the bekci baba . 0 Even deeper is the impress left by the
musdajis ('hringers of tidings”), old women whose job it was to
transmit news of the arrival of a new child and invitations to its
grand reception . 7 Their competitors, and sometimes collaborators,
were other old women who served as itinerant vendors. With their
easy access to the harems, these hardened females were admirably
situated to act as competitive relay-channels for amorous messages
and as catalysts for intrigues of various descriptions. In Turkish
folklore the sinister figure of the “old woman” recurs at a crucial
turn of tire tragedy . 8 Turkish ladies still alive can vividly recall
their childhood fear and loathing of these potent old crones . 0 The
oral tradition was deep and persistent; even among the literate
class, in this country, “it is still customary ... to send both busi-
ness and social messages by word of mouth .” 10

Another impediment to the spread of printed communication
was the institutional opposition of the Muslim clergy. The illiterate
peoples of Islam had long been taught to regard The Word as
sacred and to pay reverence even to paper, on which the name of
God might be written. The perspicacious de Busbecq records wide-

Turkey: From the Past ( 115 )

spread beliefs among 16th-century Turks concerning the sanctity
of paper. 11 Religious respect for paper did not entail a desire for
imprinting it. The first printing press did not appear in Turkey
until 1728, three centuries after its invention in Europe. 12 Ubicini
reports the opposition stimulated by the project:

On the first rumor of the proposed innovation, alarm arose through-
out Constantinople. The Ulema, under the pretence of zeal for die safety
of tlic Sacred doctrines and traditions, but in reality dreading some attack
on their own power, professed to regard the new project as profane.
The emanations of human intelligence, they alleged, having been always
handed down to posterity by writing, ought not to be subjected to any
less careful mode of transmission. 13

One result of orthodox opposition to print was that the non-
Muslim minorities took the lead. In closer touch with Europe, and
mindful of all techniques that could strengthen die cohesion of
their groups, die minorities brought their own printing presses
into Turkey as soon as diey became available in the West. Yalman
dates the Jewish press from the 15th century, the Greek and Ar-
menian presses from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. 14
Ubicini adds that an early product of die Hebrew press in 1488
was, significandy, a Manual for Children. 15 By 1520, indeed, the
Salonican Jews had a famous Talmud Torah, in a building which
housed also a complete system of secular education from grammar
school to academy. 10 Thus, the non-Muslim minorities of Turkey
gained several centuries in the education of their young and the
transmission of skills in modem communication. They have re-
tained tills lead to die present day, with interesting consequences,
as we shall see, for die current shape of communications throughout
die Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Muslim majority moved ahead slowly, at a
rate barely perceptible in the retrospect of centuries. The Turkish
press installed in 1728 quickly lapsed into disuse, during the next
period of continuous and disastrous wars, and had to be ‘re-
established” in 1784 by Selim III. Searching for ways to rehabili-
tate his declining domains, Selim used the press not for spreading
popular enlightenment but for stimulating the enfeebled elite. 17
According to Creasy, the revived press was highly speciab'zed:

Many European works on tactics and fortifications were translated
from the French and published by the Sultan’s orders, under the in-
spection of the Turkish mathematician, Abdurrahim Effendi. 18

The New Turks

( H6 )

As printing foundered, so secular public education never really
got started under the Ottoman dispensation. Secondary schools
were instituted in 1860, but whatever pupils there were went mainly
to the Medresses. These centers of primary religious instruction
were run by the ‘Ulema, or “learned men” whose learning had ter-
minated with medieval commentaries on the texts of Aristotle.
Halide Edib, Turkey’s foremost woman writer, says that “the
Medresses remained up to the end of the last century what they
were in the 13th century.” 10

The Ottoman regime failed to unify its diverse peoples through
communication and education. Sir Mark Sykes, on the eve of the
Young Turk revolt, reported an interview with a renowned Kurdish
ecclesiastic:

He told me that he had the keys of a library of 3,000 volumes in a
large tekke near Van; it contained no books in any other script save
Arabic, but there were perhaps forty or fifty volumes in Kurdish, several
works on divination and magic, and one on the Albanian method of
drawing auguries from the bones of lambs. 20

By such communications, leading Kurds of this hinterland could
hardly be rallied to the support of the imperial center. How could
be rallied, more generally, a population of 13 million in which 1%-
were literate in 1908? 21 In fact, they were not rallied and the Otto-
man Empire crumbled.

2. The Atatiirk Vectors:

Ways of Participation

In chapter II we described the secular process of moderniza-
tion as a sequence of four phases in social participation: urbaniza-
tion, literacy, media, voting. Urbanization comes first in our schema
because all that one means by modem society requires, as pre-
condition, a certain minimum of population agglomerated in cities.
Below 10% urbanization no society in our survey rated as modem
on the other indices (literacy, media, voting); above 25% prac-
tically every society rated as modem by this test. These limits there-
fore fix an essential minimum and a critical optimum for the index
of urbanization on the scale of modernization. Clearly, the denser
the total population (i.e., the higher the ratio of persons to
acreage) the more urgent the need for urban agglomerations.

Turkey: From the Past ( 117 )

Turkey as a Transitional Society has followed the urbanizing
pattern, but within a relatively benign geohistorical context. A
special feature of the Turkish situation, radically different from
the demographic position of Egypt, has been the relative absence
of Malthusian pressure of men upon land. The internal need for
massive urbanization was less intense than elsewhere; nor, since
Atatiirk abstained from international commitments, were external
pressures permitted to force the tempo. When Atatiirk undertook
to modernize Turkey, the Traditionals were still in their villages
and his task was to stimulate rather than control. Conversely Nas-
ser’s Egypt, which is heavily involved in Cold War politics, must
cope with millions who have already streamed into the capital
cities and have acquired wants that must rapidly be satisfied or
controlled.

Hence, the founding fathers of the Turkish Revolution were
under no urgent pressure to achieve urbanization in a hurry and
by draconic measures. The one need felt as pressing by Atatiirk
was for a capital city in Anatolia; the consequent rise of Ankara
is a tribute to the systemic demographic strategy he evolved. For
Ankara’s growth was not permitted to disorder the rest of Anatolia.
Ataturk’s inaugural platform had postulated a new life for the
Turkish village, but qua village. The village was not to be mod-
ernized by being urbanized, but rather by being equipped to live
as a modem village. This theme underlay the Kdy Kanunu (Village
Law of 8 March 1924), the first extensive code of laws passed by
the Grand National Assembly after the Republic was proclaimed. 22
It underlay, too, the ensuing sequence of practical measures: one
such was the institution of agricultural instruction for village youths
during their military service; another was the formation of agri-
cultural credit cooperatives through the central Z iraat Bankasi
(Agricultural Bank).

The most spectacular measure was the creation of a system of
Kdy Enstitiitii (Village Institutes). This was designed to provide
a practical primary education for villagers, who would then return
to their villages to instruct the others— i.e., a self-accelerating sys-
tem for education of villagers by villagers that would entail mini-
mum involvement of urban resources. The specific ideology of
Villagism had its place in Ataturk’s program of controlled and
measured urbanization. Its success appears in the figures for urban
growth as of 1950.

( 1X8 ) The New Turks

Table 1 — Growth of City Population 23

Year

Population In Cities

Over 20,000

Population in Cities
Over 50,000

Population in Cities
Over 100,000

1927

12.5%

7.7%

6.2 %

1935

13.0

8.0

6.4

1940

13.7

8.6

6.4

1945

14.1

9.5

7.4

1950

14.7

10.2

8.3

Only in 1950 did Turkey finally cross our symbolic lower limit
of 10 /d population in cities over 50,000 and thereby officially enter
the range of Transitional societies. It is the overall pattern of bal-
anced and cumulative growth that distinguishes the Turkish route
to modernization. The main fact not revealed by the table is that
urbanization has been largely confined to western Turkey. Geo-
graphical mobility has touched, as yet, only a portion of the Turkish
population. The 1945 census reported that 16.3 million native Turks
were still living in the same province where they were bom; only
1.7 million had been bom in a different province. 24 This means
that urbanization is yet to come throughout eastern Anatolia. Its
instigation may well date from 1955, with the first all-weather
Anatolian throughway from Istanbul to Van in the remote eastern
border province neighboring Iran. In this Anatolian area live about
8 million people, over a third of the Turkish population. 25

A second fact revealed only by detailed breakdowns is the
significant measure of pre-urbanization and suburbanization that
has occurred. Turkey is no longer a land of three metropoli with
one hinterland; in its western half today is a network of smaller
urban centers with radial zones of influence. As a new city develops,
it “magnetizes” the surrounding countryside. Some villages well
situated along its roads of access tend to grow as distribution-
points for its trade and dormitory-towns for its labor force, whereas
other villages intervening between these nuclei tend to diminish.
The dramatic transformation of Balgat, in four brief years, from
a stagnant village of under 500 souls to a “dormitory town” housing
over 2,000 and finally to a "suburb” of Ankara is but one instance
of tire process. Its extent is indicated by the fact that there are
now, besides the five great cities, a dozen centers with over 50,000
population and nearly 50 centers with over 20,000 population. 28
Meanwhile, in the decade 1935-45, the population of villages under
500 decreased by 6.5%, while those over 500 increased by 6.8%.

Turkey: From the Past ( 119 )

These proportions involve shifts of approximately 2 million people
from smaller to larger villages. During the same period, over 800
villages “disappeared” completely— just as Balgat “disappeared*
in 1954. 27

The impact of urbanization upon economic participation is
registered, first, in the occupational census. People move to cities
mainly to find new job's; or take jobs mainly to live in cities. Be-
tween 1927 and 1945 employment in the agricultural sector (farm-
ing, forestry, fishing) declined slightly over 5%. A corresponding
rise was distributed between industry, commerce, and public ad-
ministration. 28 This involved a major occupational shift between
sectors for over a million persons. 20 Again the detailed breakdowns
are revealing, even for the less dramatic occupational shifts within
sectors. They show, for example, a relative decline of employment
in village-produced consumer goods (textiles, food and drink, to-
bacco), matched by substantial increases of employment in pro-
duction goods. Mining doubled, machine tools and energy sources
virtually quadrupled, and a chemical industry came into existence.
The numbers involved in these shifts are small, but the 1945 figures
of a mere 2,557 employed in chemicals takes on a different aspect
when seen alongside the comparable figures of 890 in 1935 and 0
in 1924. 30 These occupational shifts correspond to urban growth
in Turkey, moderate in tempo, but far more rapid and balanced
than die pattern typical of the Middle Eastern area.

Along with these shifts has come significant growth in per capita
income distribution. We shall have occasion to compare income
data in Turkey and elsewhere, showing consistent advances among
the Turks. That their situation in 1949 was deplorable as compared
with U.S. standards has been suggested by Thornburg. But the
improvements then already wrought in the daily life of living
Turks is indicated in Table 2 below compiled by R. D. Robinson.

This table is a human document which speaks eloquently for
itself. We underline only the three communication items at the top
and bottom of the list. In 1929 movies were non-existent in Turkey;
by 1949 it was the commodity to which the ordinary Turk gained
access on the terms of closest equality with the ordinary Ameri-
can. In 1929 a Turkish newspaper cost as much as a pound of
bread; 32 by 1949 it cost 33% less and brought the Turk’s price much
closer to what the U.S. worker paid for his paper. In access to a
radio of his own (as we have seen, a good index of advanced

( 120 )

The New Turks

Table 2 — Value of Labor in Turkey and U.S. (1949 J 31

To Buy

An Ordinary Turkish
Worker Takes at least

This Long;

An Ordinary U.S.
Worker Takes at most

This Long

Time Rolio,
Turk lo
American

These Things;

A radio

Hours

500

Minutes

0

Hours

12

Minutes

30

40:1

A pound of sugar

2

45

0

5

33:1

A kw-hour of eleclricify

0

48

0

2

24:1

A 5-gallon fin of kerosene

23

20

1

2

22:1

An automobile

20,000

0

1,145

50

17:1

A pair of shoes

130

0

10

0

13:1

A pound of pofafoes

0

36

0

3

12:1

A man's suit

333

0

33

20

10:1

A pound of cheap soap

2

30

0

15

10:1

A quart of milk

1

30

0

11

9:1

A package of cigarettes

1

0

0

10

6:1

A pound of wheat flour

0

28

0

5

5 Vi :1

A pound of bread

0

32

0

7

4 y 2 »i

A bottle of beer

1

10

0

15

4%:1

A cup of coffee

0

20

0

5

4:1

A cotton dress

23

20

6

40

3 %: 1

One egg

0

10

0

3

3:1

A pound of onions

0

16

0

6

3:1

A daily newspaper

0

20

0

6

3:1

Admission to a cinema

1

0

0

30

2:1

(a) Assumes a wage of 3.00 Turkish lira per ten-hour day, or 30 kurus per hour. This
wage is generally considered to be high.

(b) Assumes a wage of $9.60 per eight-hour day, or $1.20 per hour. On the basis of
statistical evidence, this would seem to be low.

industrialization ) the Turk compared on least favorable terms with
the American. Even in 1949 this gap was bridged by wide distribu-
tion of community radios through the Halk-evleri; since then indi-
vidual ownership has increased many times over (see Table 5 ff.).
The growth of media, along with the parallel growth of literacy,
provide the production-consumption reciprocal for a commodity
which lay at the heart of the Turkish revolution: i.e.. Enlighten-
ment. It was to spread information and opinion, and thereby par-
ticipation through consensus, that Atatiirk engineered the Republic
largely as a “communication revolution.” In his conception, this
was the essential companion of urbanization, designed to transform
the Turkish psyche as cities transformed Turkish behavior.

3. The Communication Revolution

Communication begins with language. Atatiirk, taking first
things first in his usual way, started with a revolutionary shift from

Turkey: From the Past ( 121 )

Arabic to Western script. Widespread literacy is an indispensable
condition of the modem style of life, urban version. The efficient
functioning of a city presupposes an economy of discourse for
which the essential commodity is print— produced by media and
consumed by the literate. Again, Balgat dramatizes the historical
logic of the transition to literacy. So long as it was a Traditional
village, the Grocer managed to run h is affairs with a dozen un-
labeled sacks. In the city grocery which he admired, however, the
attractive rows of cans concealed their contents in the approved
hygienic manner. The illiterate is an inefficient customer in a
modem shop; to make intelligent choices the consumer must be
able to read the descriptive labels and compare their prices. This
presumes the 3 R’s.

On a more complex level, literacy transforms personal perspec-
tives precisely by accumulating such alterations in the simple
routines of daily behavior. The urbanite requires more concepts
to organize his percepts efficiently. The process by which his move-
ments in a grocery store eventually lead to the meal on his table
requires reading and computing at every turn, operations which
serve no function in the villager’s daily round. Mental operations
of the urban sort grow and flourish only in a setting where the
required skills are widely spread. It was tlus larger sense of literacy
that Ataturk intended when he proclaimed: “The cornerstone of
our cultural policy is the suppression of ignorance.” 33

So Ataturk ruled that “the most productive and important duty
of the state is pubh'c instruction.” 34 The secular drive of the new
Republic infused its educational program, as the mystique of
Villagism shaped its course. Major emphasis went into the in-
genious system of Village Schools and Institutes, by which the
slender resources of available literacy were to prime a self-
accelerating process of practical basic instruction among villagers.
It is, however, more difficult for the ignorant to acquire the habits
of literacy than for the penurious to acquire the sense of cash.
Educational diffusion was a tougher problem for Ataturk than
occupational redistribution, since its advantages were less self-
evident and hence the motivations of the populace less easily
aroused. In such case Ataturk proceeded in the fashion of Bona-
parte rather than Talleyrand. A sweeping ukase decreed that the
new village schools would be built by the villages themselves;

( 122 ) The New Turks

and a very large proportion were built in fact by the forced labor
and money contribution of the villagers. To ensure that once built
they would be used, Atatiirk, with the canny sense of social control
typified in Ottoman administration at its most efficient, further
decreed that the village teacher would henceforth occupy a place
in the Village Council.

The situation of urban teachers in the rude village setting dur-
ing the early years was hard. One pioneer teacher stressed the
communication void:

The village was small and primitive, lacking even a coffee house.
Mail arrived but once or twice each week. There was not a single radio
instrument for receiving news and music from the outside world. Lying
at the edge of the peninsula, it had no traffic passing through it. There
was not a single resident whose educational background made him a
congenial companion. 35

The teachers were often ostracized and even beaten by the vil-
lagers. Their experiences have created a distinct literature. A vivid
autobiographic account is Qaliku§u (“The Wren”), the story of an
Istanbul girl assigned to teach in Anatolian villages, which became
the first “best-seller” in Turkish literary history (20,000 copies in
26 years). 36

A village teacher of the second generation, Mahmut Makal,
who at age 19 had been embattled by those he wanted to teach
and then thrown in jail, has since written an extraordinary docu-
ment which is both passionate autobiography and descriptive so-
ciology. His Bizim Koy (“Our Village”) highlights the slow tempo,
bitter struggle, and often meager fruit of the search for modem
enlightenment in traditional society. It is a noteworthy corrective,
however, that this harsh account has itself become the all-time
best-seller of Turkey. At the rate of 50,000 sold in four years,
Bizim Koy is probably the only book that has been read by more
living Turks than have read the Koran. That its author is a bom
villager, bred by the Village Institutes, suggests that the fruit of
the young growth, if sparse, can be nourishing. That there now
exists in Turkey a market of over 50,000 people able to buy the
book, and an audience possibly six times as large able to read it, is
a datum which suggests that economic participation via cash, and
psychocultural participation via literacy, have grown together in
significant measure. 37

Turkey: From the Past ( 123 )

Progress through the Village Institutes is slow. Many of these
people learn to read, painfully, but not to write. They acquire
bare literacy, but not the literate way of thought. They can sign
their names and decipher tax notices, but they remain on the
periphery of participation-as we shall see in our later case studies
of the “low Transitionals” in Turkey today. The government classi-
fies these persons as “illiterates knowing how to read” and they
composed 35 % of the illiterate population in 1945. 88 The primary
school population shows a fivefold increase— from 337,000 in 1923
to 1,600,000 in 1950 but this leaves the great majority still outside
the educational institution. 30 Even this moderate scale of achieve-
ment has been possible only by the ingenious use of all opportuni-
ties, including some outside the formal educational structure. Dur-
ing their military service, illiterate conscripts are taught enough
3 It's, hygiene, and citizenship to qualify for admission, after
discharge, to Village or Trade Institutes. The government also
has increased its own “priming” function; the education component
of annual government expenditures has risen from 5% in 1939 to
12% since 1950.4°

The priority on rudimentary education was accelerated in
recent years as it became clear that a new elite was on hand, com-
mitted to the Republic in principle and competent to operate it
in practice. During the period 1946-51, a total increase of 3,000
schools was recorded, of which about 2,000 were elementary and
only 150 were secondary schools, 41 This continues Atatiirk’s policy
of “suppression of ignorance” on a wide front winch, slowly but
steadily, has paid off. The decade 1935-45 registered a 10% increase
of literacy (reading and writing) in a constantly rising popula-
tion. 42 This was unique in the prewar Middle East and the figure
is focused by regional comparisons. In 1953, while Eastern Ana-
tolia was lowest with only 20% literacy, Western Anatolia and
Thrace had attained the overall figure of 50% literacy.

This is precisely the lower limit of literacy fixed by our global
study, corresponding to the lower limit of 10% urbanization, needed
for the transition to self-sustained growth. Western Turkey en-
tered die modem world on both these indices in the “correct”
symbolic proportions-an extraordinary display of balanced mod-
ernization. Turkey’s internal stability during rapid transition, reflects
these close growth-ratios between literacy and urbanization, as
summarized by the 1945 figures in Table 3.

(124)

The New Turks

Table 3 — Literacy by Sex and Place 43

Size of Placo

Male

female

Total

Cities over 30,000

72%

48%

62%

10,000-30,000

63

32

49

Rest of Turkey

36

11

23

This table also shows the especially liberating effect of mod-
ernization among urban women. Removal of the veil was a symbolic
gesture that affected primarily city and town women, since village
women had rarely veiled. In places larger than 10,000, whereas
male literacy is not quite double the rest of Turkey, female literacy
has trebled the rural growth rate. The same impact is recorded in
the occupational distribution. In the 1935-45 decade, female em-
ployment in the new urban industries consistently multiplied ten-
fold and hundredfold— the more significant in that the process
began, in most cases, from near -zero. 44

The relatively rapid advances among women, matched and
exceeded by advances among youth of both sexes, gave a special
impetus to the psychocultural transition. For, while males in
modem society typically spend a major portion of their waking
hours at work, women and children typically have more leisure.
When supplied with media, and equipped by literacy to enjoy
their use, the female and youthful segments of the population
typically become major participants in the modem communication
system.

Thus, the number of Turkish periodicals devoted to children
and education spurted from 15 in 1945 to 50 in 1950. This rate of
increase proved to be excessive and one year later the number of
such periodicals had been cut back to 27, still a noteworthy increase
over 1945 but a more moderate one. 45 Thus, too. Radio Ankara
introduced in 1952 a daily “Hour of the Child” which is a sub-
stantial block of time in a limited programming schedule that
traditionally has been devoted mainly to political news and dis-
cussion.

The comparable acceleration of media participation among
women is shown in Table 4 by their relative increase over men,
year after year, among registered readers in public libraries.
While the male readership is much larger and has increased stead-
ily, among women readers this population has more than doubled.
Public libraries, of course, are mainly metropolitan institutions;

Turkey: From the Past ( 125 )

and capital cities dominate the world of books in Turkey as they
do in more developed countries. Other printed media have, how-
ever, been decentralizing at a steady rate. During the 1946-51
period, 149 new printing presses went into operation. Of these 54
went to Ankara (total 66) and 33 to Istanbul (total 266); the re-
maining 62 presses were distributed among the smaller urban
centers. By 1951, only 6 of the 63 Turkish provinces had no press
and 17 provinces had five or more presses. 47

Table 4 — Public Library Readers, by Sex 40

READERS

Year

Male

Female

1936

7 19,089

53/166

1950

772,963

118,392

A major link between urbanization and modem communication
systems is electricity, the source of power which operates printing
presses, transmits radio broadcasts, and illuminates motion pic-
tures. Turkey, having completed the electrification of its provincial
centers, is now electrifying parish centers and, before the decade
ends, should be into the final phase of village electrification. 48
Progress in the electrification program is matched nicely by the
distribution of radio sets shown, by size and type of place, in
Table 5.

Whereas the total figure doubled from 1945 to 1951, increases
in the smaller centers trebled. The province centers show directly
the impact of earlier electrification. The numerically smaller in-
creases in parish centers and villages reflect, as a special feature,
the widespread distribution of cheap battery sets prior to the

Table 5 — Distribution of Radio Sets 40

She of Place

1945

1951

Province Cenleri

106,045

208,424

District Centers

45,130

126,110

Parish Centers

14,502

41,301

Yittogos

10,585

36,435

Total

176,262

412,270

T ype el Place

Homes

161,341

379,720

Public Places

13,926

30,680

Olher Places

995

1,870

( 126 ) The New Turks

1950 election campaign. Each of these sets, which mainly account
for the increased distribution in “public places,” brought broad-
casting to an entire village for the first time. Another such spurt
occurred prior to the 1954 election, registering a further 50% in-
crease in the total radio sets. The growth of film and press have,
proportionately, kept pace. In this way psychic participation through
media and political participation through voting come to reinforce
each other even in rural Turkey, with consequences we shall
shortly explore in detail.

With but two national elections reported, trend-data are in-
conclusive on die tempo of political development. But the avail-
able figures do establish that electoral participation (the fourth
variable in our global model ) has been extremely high. Naturally,
participation is most marked in the five great cities, as shown by
the following proportion of eligible voters in 1954 who actually
cast their ballots: Ankara 96%, Adana 93%, Izmir 89%, Bursa 85%,
Istanbul 75%. These figures are striking even if somewhat inflated.
Such a turnout might be expected in Ankara, a vibrant new capital
city which senses itself to be the nerve-center of a great adventure
in social change, but few observers foresaw the extent to which
the entire country participated in both elections.

Table 6 — Electoral Participation 50

Election Eligible Voters Votes Cast Participation Rate

14 May 1950 8,905,576 7,916,091 88.9%

2 May 1954 10,259,452 8,300,000 80.9%

In the retrospect of 1970, the extraordinary rate of 88.9% in
1950 may be seen as a first enthusiastic response to a new oppor-
tunity for political participation. If so, there is by now sufficient
historical evidence of Turkish stability to justify confidence that
a voting level appropriate to the over-all scale of participation will
establish itself. For it is precisely this persistent quality of dynamic
equilibrium that has given the Turkish Republic its distinctive
place among the modernizing societies of the twentieth century.

There is no implication here that an excellent principle produces
invariably excellent results. Much of what has been done, and
continues to be done, in the name of the Turkish Republic wears
an unlovely aspect in the eye of a Western observer. Coercion has
been called in to pinch-hit for persuasion on many occasions, not

Turkey: From, the Past ( 127 )

because the opposition had filled the bases with winning runs but
because the manager was nervous. Arbitrary abuse of the central
power recurs too often to be overlooked in any serious account of
Turkey today. While the voters were triumphantly participating
in the 1954 election Hiiseyin Cahit Yal$in, editorialist of the oppo-
sition People’s Party paper Halkgi and dean of Turkish journalists,
was confined in the Uskiidar prison at Istanbul, sentenced to 26
months for editorials displeasing to the government. 51 Similarly,
when the editors of another opposition party paper Millet accused
the government of dictatorial methods in August 1954, the govern-
ment promptly justified the charge by clapping them in jail. 52
A more rational course might be expected from a government
which, having just been re-elected to office by a huge majority,
could afford to act with self-confidence.

If authoritarian ways persist, however, they are less frequent
and widespread than earlier repression; and the countervailing
force of the mass media makes itself increasingly felt. Just as the
earlier arrest of Mabmut Makal was nullified after an outburst of
public protest, so the arrest of Yalfin stimulated a large press cam-
paign to obtain his liberation. This is a noteworthy item in the
sequence of Turkish modernization. A decade ago there was no
opposition press to protest at all. Today, such a press exists and
is heard; tomorrow its voice will be heeded. By such a charac-
teristic evolution, probably, Turkey will finally incorporate in sys-
temic form the difficult modem perception that an opposition is
to be outwitted, not outlawed.

Tin's follows, in large measure, from the favorable circumstances
in which Turkey’s republican politics originated and developed.
The world political arena was not bipolar in 1924-44, hence Ata-
tiirk’s policies were not threatened by that invasion of external
power linked to organized internal issues which has made stable
governance in postwar-II Egypt, Syria, Iran so difficult. Atatiirk
was able to rally his cohorts behind a program of national mod-
ernization without the intrusion of the world oil politics that downed
Mossadegh, the world strategic struggles that detoured Nasser,
and the world ideological conflicts that have split the elites in
both countries as in Syria and Jordan. The Ottoman Empire had
developed a tradition of governance among its educated classes,
rather than the traditions of profitable acquiescence or irrespon-
sible opposition under foreign tutelage which spread through the

( 128 ) The New Turks

Arab lands. Of great importance, as we have seen, was Atatiirk’s
favorable demographic heritage— a set of land-man ratios that
made rational planning of large-scale modernization feasible. All
these predisposing factors, put to good use through foresighted
policies and efficient administration, made possible the balanced
growth at a steady rate which underlies the Turkish political revo-
lution. What makes Turkeys political stability over three decades
so “revolutionary” is that these decades have witnessed the emer-
gence of the only truly democratic, multiparty system that incor-
porates the consent of the governed through widespread electoral
participation. This brief summary does not ignore that Atatiirk’s
methods were often dictatorial, and that relics are still evident in
onslaughts upon those civil liberties which a participant system
requires. It does foresee the reduction of such short-term .measures
by the party in power in behalf of the longer-run gains that accrue
to a participant polity from the incorporation of opposition.

Such prophecy of the Turkish future is based, as all forecasting
must be, upon the Turkish paths to the present. The process of
psychic liberation has, in the course of three decades touching
three generations, become systemic in the Turkish Republic. When
both major parties are committed by their past and their present
to the increasing production of “New Turks,” the process can no
longer be seriously disordered by the results of an election. The
production of “New Turks” can now be halted, in all probability,
only by the countervailance of some stochastic factor of cataclysmic
proportions— such as an atomic war. As this would invariably bypass
the results of any social research in the present, we confine our
discussion of Turkish transition within the set of historical con-
ditions that has been outlined. Within this framework, however,
we seek to determine its meaning in the profound sense that the
Turks themselves have assigned to the production of “New Turks
— i.e., the integral transformation of personality.

4. Toward New Turks

An effort of imagination is required to perceive the specific
personal meanings of a social fact. Imagination is inadequately
served, for this purpose, by the diffuse imagery associated with
the familiar labels, such as a barter economy. Historically, in any
society, the “sense of cash” is an acquired trait. It has to be learned,

T vrkcy: From the Vast ( 129 )

often painfully, by a large number of people before their society
can negotiate the perilous passage from barter to exchange. Con-
sider, for example, this sentence on the traditional Anatolian peas-
antry by Professor H. A. R. Gibb:

We may suppose the rc'atja to have been animated hardly at all
by any idea of gain, and to have worked their land with a minimum of
effort and very little knowledge/’ 3

Gain, effort, knowledge— these are huge categories of discourse.
For any adequate comprehension of the personality transformation
which accompanied the shift from barter to cash in contemporary
Turkey, we are obliged to take these large terms in their historical
sense. What has been acquired in one generation, among a popu-
lation that had always been ignorant and indifferent, is precisely
the sense of gain, effort, knowledge which came over centuries to
guide personal behavior in the modem participant society.

A profound cleavage is discernible, naturally, between those
Turks who have acquired the participant style of modem life and
those who have not. We distinguish these polar groups, respec-
tively, as The Modems and The Traditional. Between them lie
The Transitionals, those increasingly numerous and future-contain-
ing Turks whose story has poignancy for the restless souls now
appearing in every underdeveloped land of the Middle East. One
must be careful in dealing with such “ideal types.” This method
has the advantage of clarifying the regularities of biography and
personality winch distinguish one social type from another; its
disadvantage is that the boundaries are too sharply etched and
the final portrait sometimes belies the subject simply by its excessive
clarity. We have here sought the gain without the loss, first by
constructing a threefold typology (rather than the usual dichotomy
which may induce excessive polarization); then by proceeding in
fairly strict empirical fashion on the crucial points. We began by
sorting out the Turks in our sample according to conventional
sociological indices: age, sex, residence, socio-economic status. This
gave us a classification of limited analytic utility, since the re-
semblances between members of each group were restricted to
precisely those traits and no others.

W T c advanced the matter somewhat when we sorted further
by the criterion of media-participation: the frequency with which
each person read newspapers, saw movies, and listened to radio

( 130 ) The New Turks

broadcasts. It is dear why this should differentiate individuals in
a society where the mass media are relatively new and meager,
hence where media exposure is a distinctive experience for most
people. In modem Western society, where all who read can run,
“the news” is a pervasive element in the daily round and can hardly
be avoided. But in Turkey, there coexist two quite different social
settings. A Modem setting operates in the cities of Western Turkey,
where flourish a system of media, a literate corps of “communi-
cators” and “audiences,” a continuous and comprehensive coverage
of world events. In the Traditional setting that prevails through-
out the hamlets and villages of the Anatolian steppe, however,
there are practically no theatres, few radios, and scant newspaper
circulation. There oral communication provides the rudimentary
equivalent of entertainment and enlightenment which, in the Mod-
em setting, people obtain through the mass media. In a Turkey
so bifurcated, one might expect a man’s status and psyche to be
much more closely related to his communication situation than
would be the case in a media-saturated modem society.

Such correlations did, in fact, appear as between the “pure”
Modems and Traditionals. However, as .we moved from the ideal
types deeper into empirical data, lines regularly crossed. Certain
low-status persons with high-media exposure exhibited attitudes
akin to the Modem style, while others in the same status remained
closer to the Traditional outlook. The most satisfactory way of
accounting for such variations turned out to be the personality
variable of empathy, shown by the capacity for ready ego-identi-
fication in new situations. This defined the Transitionals in such
a way as to separate them consistently from Modems and Tradi-
tionals. At tire same time, capacities for identification could be
rank-ordered to discriminate differences of degree among Transi-
tionals.

The portraits we have drawn accent the psychic mechanism
upon which turns the future development of a participant style
among Turks, with special attention to the engagement of this
mechanism in the developing communication system. They are
to be understood within the historical context we have sketched of
social change under the Republic. A corps of Modems existed in
Turkey, almost exclusively in Istanbul, over many pre-Atatiirk
generations. It was reinvigorated by those who made the Revolu-
tion and has been steadily incremented by the “New Turks” who

Turkey: From the Past ( 131 )

grew throughout Western Turkey under their tutelage. The incre-
ments have begun to come, only in the past generation, from the
vast inert population of Traditional that still prevail throughout
Anatolia. Those who have disengaged themselves from the tradi-
tional mass and moved toward the life-styles of modem men are
the Transitionals, In the growing number and influence of these
men-in-motion will be written the next phase of the Turkish
story. To perceive more clearly the lines of evolution among these
Transitionals, we look first at the Tradib'onals whence they came
and then, in the next chapter, at the Modems whither they go.

5. Traditionals: The Constrictive Self

Western man began, decades ago, to agonize over "the man
with die hoe” who seemed, in Edwin Markham’s words, “bowed by
the weight of centuries . . . stolid and stunned, a brother to the
ox.” Only more recently, however, have we applied techniques for
obtaining more precise description of what happens to men rout-
inized in the age-old lifeways of Traditional societies. It is especially
fortunate for our present understanding that scholars trained in
these techniques have recorded their observations of Turkish vil-
lage life in several phases of transition.

A doctoral dissertation by J. A. Morrison described how the
peasants of Ali$ar, a village of £92 souls and 58 households located
in the Kunak Su Basin of Central Anatolia, lived in 1932 “much
as did the occupants of the hiitjuk three thousand years ago.” More-
over, this situation appeared to the Ali?ar villager as quite normal,
since he neither knew nor sought any other way of living. Morrison
reported:

The Anatolian peasant is singularly incurious about almost everything
that does not directly concern his daily life. To the average peasant, any-
thing that happened more than fifty or sixty years ago is "50k esld”
(very old), regardless of whether the event took place one hundred or
one thousand years earlier. Asked how old his village is, he wall answer
with exasperating vagueness not unmixed with satisfaction “50k esld.” 54

The quality of “exasperating vagueness” has been described
by Muzafer Sherif, an American social psychologist of Turkish
origin, who in 1944 conducted a series of studies in five Turkish
villages. Those were ranked in terms of their degree of contact
with die products and facilities of modem technology. Within each

( 132 ) The New Turks

rank he then compared the responses of the villagers on “a few
basic phenomena dealing primarily with the units, precision, and
scope of space, distance, and time perceptions . . . conceptions
of the alien or strange, and of wealth.” Sheriff findings confirm
our basic proposition that mobility tends to be system ic, i.e., physi-
cal, social and psychic mobility “go together” in every village. His
general summation is that: “The radius of the world in which the
individual lives his daily life widens in proportion to the degree
of contact with modem technology.” 55

The specific results from which Sherif draws Iris conclusions
are very instructive. The sense of cash, for example, develops in
proportion to the degree of contact with modernity. In every village
the local scale of riches is fixed at both extremes by the limits
known to the villagers, each of whom determines his own status
by his relative position on the scale. In the most isolated of his
five villages, Sherif found that “the greatest sum of money one
can actually conceive of is about $80 for women and around $800
for men”; in the most advanced village, imagination soared to
$5,000. The notion of “wealth” as a potentially indeterminate quan-
tity, whose appropriate metric is purchasing power, appears only
in those villages which have already begun to shift from a sub-
sistence to a cash economy. With increasing exposure to the supple
scope and limits of monetization develops the “sense of cash.

So, too, with the sense of space, distance, time— the geotemporal
universe. Only in the measure that they come into contact with
urban society do villagers acquire the concepts, indeed the lan-
guage, of precise and standard units. Sherif found that the vil-
lagers could estimate distances with any accuracy only in terms of
travel by foot. Guesses of distances any of them had covered by
a conveyance were extraordinarily erratic. “They have no idea
how far these distances really are. They cannot translate them
into terms of walking time, their real psychological distance unit.
In Karlik (most isolated) the older men believe that the province
of Van in Turkey is farther away than is Galicia, which is now in
Poland and is in fact several times more distant than Van. The
belief is due to several oldsters who served in both provinces dur-
ing World War I; but they went to Galicia on the train, while they
had to walk most of the way to Van.

Also, in Karlik “only a few villagers know the names of the

Turkey: From the Past ( 133 )

days of the week and of the calendar months.” Even in Be?ikduzu
(least isolated) only 80 of the 842 villagers use a calendar or a
timepiece. Recall, in this connection, the purely decorative dock
in the guest room of The Chief in Balgat Hours are identified by
phases of the sun; days by markets in the vicinity (e.g., Tuesday
may be "two days before the Gorele Market”); months and seasons
by the fanning routine (“hazelnut-gathering time”). Events of
past years and decades are located in terms of wars experienced
and other memorable, usually catastrophic, events. Small wonder
that Morrison’s villagers could only reply, with “exasperating
vagueness,” gok eskil

Such psychic traits as Sherif describes interact endlessly with
the established institutions of Traditional society, from which they
derive and which in turn they reinforce. These institutions usually
are authoritarian, patriarchal, changeless; the values they enjoin
are loyalty, obedience, inertia. The whole complex forms a “cour-
age culture,” in which absence of curiosity is a primary component
(“theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die”). The absence
of curiosity goes together with the absence of knowledge in a
reciprocal equation; ignorance and immobility are twin growths.
Sir James Frazer has shown, for a variety of Traditional societies,
the persistent interaction between superstition (absence of knowl-
edge) and stability (absence of change). 60

The key to the equation is communication, the social system
of messages by which beliefs are transmitted between and within
generations. The folklore of Anatolia is instructive in this regard.
In these ageless tales, change is regularly identified with evil.
Prominent among their population of malevolent beings, for ex-
ample, are the Jinns, whose distinctive trait is the power to assume
any shape they wish. Changeability, in such a context, is perceived
as shameful. By contrast with the modem pluralist conception of
personality in which “adaptability” figures as a major virtue and
an indispensable skill, the Traditional man is cut once and for all
to a familiar pattern. The mold is the same for all men of the
same age and rank. The persistent deviant is not merely the odd
"eccentric” or amusing “character” of tolerant modernity; as a
threat to village rigidities he risks instead the grave reprisal of
becoming the village "idiot” or "outcast.” Such a setting does not
encourage exploration among strange identities or experiment

( 134 ) The New Turks

with unfamiliar roles. Ego-identification becomes compulsive, em-
pathy is lacking, and a Constrictive Self becomes the approved
personal style.

The taciturnity of villagers is a specific communication aspect
of life in a “courage culture.” Words are terribly awesome matters
to Traditional man, who knows relatively few of them and uses
them with some difficulty. Modem children learn young that
“sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm
me.” Tbe Anatolian proverb says: “The hurt of a stick dies away,
but words hurt forever.” The extreme susceptibility of Traditional
Turks to the danger of words has shown itself in legal measures
adopted to prevent ridicule of persons. The Republican govern-
ment, under the war-heightened tension of 1940, ordered a cen-
sorship of all Western publications; every word derogatory to the
Turks was to be excised or the entire publication removed from
circulation.

On the behavioral level, oral passivity is often associated with
physical aggressiveness. This is the theme of H. G. Dwight's strik-
ing tale of “Memish,” a mild Anatolian servant, who brooded long
over a man who had called him afraid of a knife; then used all
his meager savings to buy a knife and kill the man, with pride
but without pleasure, in a fair fight. 57 The general point has been
well made by Dr. Eleanor Bisbee, warm friend and keen observer
of the New Turks: “Frustration in Turkey, bitter enough for vi-
olence, can often be traced to the inarticulateness of die illiterate,
who defend themselves with blows when their words fail.” 58

In polar contrast to the Traditional “courage culture,” where
the constricted self is routinized in the performance of duty with
loyalty and obedience committed once for all, is the Modem type
of “ingenuity culture.” Here the appropriate personal style is the
expansive, desirous, seeking, acquiring individual. In the Modem
milieu a man gets on by his wits in new opportunities, not by Ids
inertia in familiar routines. In the perceptual apparatus of Modem
men, all scales are in principle infinite until proved otherwise. He
locates himself not at some fixed point in the rank-order of things
known, but at some moving point of desire in a scale of filings
imagined. Aspiration, curiosity, know-how overcome constriction,
impassivity, ignorance as Traditional men move toward Modernity-
Participation replaces isolation, effort replaces acquiescence, ini-
tiative replaces inertia. It exaggerates, but probably does not

Turkey: From the Past ( 135 )

falsify, the time-space perspectives of Modern man to say "the
sky’s the limitl” and “the world’s my oyster!” Few indeed are those,
even among the most modernized, who go all the way in con-
sistently living out such a perspective. But how much longer is
the way when one starts with people for whom the largest fortune
conceivable for a woman is $80; in a society where units of time
and space are hardly known; among a population who see the
future as always strange, hence ominous, and the past only as a
diffuse "gdk cski!”

To cover this terrain more systematically, showing how the
changing styles of life had worked themselves out in the setting
of the Turkish Republic as of 1950, we turn directly to the results
obtained by interviewing a varied sample of Turks, Here, insofar
as is consistent with clarity, we shall let the Turks speak for
themselves.

Y.

Turkey: Toward the Future

"On progress we shall set our heart. We shall slap
five hundred years and not stand still.”

— Ziya Gokalp, Esrnf Destani

THIS CHAPTER disengages the Transitionals from the
matrix of traditional attitudes we have just sketched and compares
the three types among the respondents. To test the role played by
the “communication revolution” in Turkish modernization, we
made an independent classification of our respondents according
to their exposure to mass media. The results gave a very dose
fit to the expectations derived from other indices in our typology
of Modems, Transitionals, Traditionals. Turkish Modems were
found to be the heavily-participant individuals who regularly read
a daily newspaper and listen to the radio. Most of the Traditionals
never (or hardly ever) do either and show little interest in the
media. Transitionals occasionally are exposed to both; moreover
their media exposure is limited by circumstances rather than desire
—they would like to participate more often than they can. We then
cross-tabulated these media-groups with each sociological attribute
to see where variance occurred. Our findings confirmed the con-
sistent relationship between media-exposure and biographical at-
tributes that had been hypothesized. The three groups (defined
only by media exposure) distributed themselves quite as expected.
Table 1 shows the proportions of each type who are younger liter-
ates living in cities, with relatively higher income, occupation, edu-
cation. The differentia that count most in the disengagement of
Transitionals are occupation, education, and of course literacy’. The
job is a major source of enlightenment, a channel through which ex-

( 136 )

Turkey: Toward the Future

( 137 )

Table J — Social Correlates of Media Exposure

Upptr Unis

Moderns

Tromlllonols

Traditionals

Urbonlxolron

81%

61%

35%

Income*

85

68

43

Occupation )

75

51

18

Education^

70

46

8

literacy

98

71

19

Agei Under 50

86

83

66

No. of respondent^

(105)

(105)

(49)

• InftfnrUwer'* eiflmaft.

f Prof«ttlonal, clerical, end anfrepreneurlol occupation!.

j Abov* elementary tchoollng.

{ Th* number! In each table for Turkey are c! above unlen otherwlte stated.

perience of tlic larger world is acquired. Preconditions are schooling
and literacy. Access to these channels differentiates modem men
from their ancestors; and the distribution of such access is a fair
index of modernization in any society.

Having differentiated our subsample by frequency of exposure
to all media, we asked whether there were consistent differences in
exposure to the different media. Each respondnt had been asked to
recall the source of his last piece of news, with results shown in
Table 2. The Modems acquire what they consider “news” mainly
through the media system, recalling equally radio and newspaper
items. The Traditionals receive their news mainly through the oral
system. The Transitionals participate in both systems. They recall
newspaper and radio items, but word-of-mouth also figures often as
a source of news. This is one of several results to be reported which
indicate how Transitionals operate as a media-oral relay between
the two separate “worlds” represented by these systems.

Table 2 — Source of Last News

Madtrnt

Tronstllonals

Traditionals

Newspaper

54%

46%

8%

Radio

39

26

10

Word of mouth

6

26

78

No news

1

2

4

Total

100%

100%

100%

The cumulative character of media participation was under-
lined when respondents were questioned in detail on their media
habits. As Traditionals show little or no exposure, these questions

The New Turks

( 138 )

were asked only of Modems and Transitionals. The responses, in
Table 3, show that the more habitual newspaper reader is also
the more likely reader of several papers, tire more regular radio
listener is also the more likely listener to several sources (including
foreign stations).

Table 3 — Media Habits

Moderns

TronsHionolt

Among Newspaper Readers:

Read Two or More Papers

85%

58%

Among Radio Listeners:

Listen to Foreign Broadcasts

67

44

Among Foreign Listeners:

Heard BBC

83

63

Heard Voice of America

51

37

Heard Radio Moscow

17

11

Media participation thus tends to be centripetal. As radio and
press diffuse through different social strata and geographical areas,
they tend to converge on the same people in the same places. This
may explain why hopes for achieving quick milennia of moderniza-
tion through the media alone usually have been disappointed. Such
hopes are based on too simple a theory of the communication func-
tion. In accomplishing social change, the flow of influence between
media and institutions is not unilateral but reciprocal. One does
not penetrate traditional barriers of isolation, ignorance, indiffer-
ence simply by installing a radio. What is changed, for example,
when the radio is installed at a mosque, under charge of tire local
Imam, who turns it on exclusively for broadcasting die daily calls
to prayer and then turns it off again (as I witnessed in the Persian
town of Gom)? While the media system tends to become self-
accelerating once in operation, its initial tempo of diffusion among
new audiences is slow.

Given the media’s centripetal tendency, particularly marked
during the early phase, it is natural that the cleavage between the
enlightened and the unenlightened should remain great in Turkey
today. Consider these responses, in Table 4, to questions testing
level of information on current world affairs.

These distributions are as expected, but die importance of
media participation is indicated by the substantial increments of
information among Transitionals over Traditionals. Transitional
awareness of such remote matters shows how the horizon widens,

Turkey: Toward the Future

(139)

Table 4 — Concentration of Information

Information Abovh

Modtrns

Translllortalx

Trcditfonaft

Unlltd Nations

Who) It It

82%

55%

10%

Where II It meeting

72

50

10

Who Is See'y. Gcn'I.

52

26

2

Morshall Plan

28

21

9

Foreign People*

American*

48

41

16

British

41

30

14

Ruttlant

4

3

2

exposure deepens, and enlightenment increases as the media pene-
trate into new strata and areas. The conjunction is clearer when
these responses arc collated with a battery of items, as in Table 5,
testing direct and mediated exposure to the foreign world.

Both direct and mediated experience increase with moderniza-
tion. The 10% of Traditionals who visited a foreign country are
oldsters (like the Chief) who did so during their military service.
Hie “contacts” with Americans and other foreigners signify the
unforgettable experience of seeing a modem-dressed man appear
in their village. (Some of the urban Turkish interviewers re-
ported being taken as “foreigners” by Anatolian villagers.) By
contrast, the Transitionals show a substantial increment of medi-
ated over direct exposure to the outer world. This is partly due
to the special function of the pictorial media in widening the
horizons of semi-literate and non-literary people. Visual images
being more easily comprehensible, films and magazines often
diffuse more rapidly among such a population. Apart from this,
the results underscore the more general concurrence between

Table 5 — Foreign Exposure: Mediated and Direct

Expoivre

Moderns

Transitional*

Traditionals

Know o foreign language
Direct

54%

33%

12%

Viilled a foreign country

37

22

10

Foreign contaclt in Turkey

59

47

18

Know individual Americans

48

41

16

Mediated

Attend moviet

88

63

27

Prefer American moviet*

68

48

23

Read foreign magazines* 82

• Amcno wovl*»poon end Jhoie who know o fcretgn

69

longuoge.

33

( 140 ) The New Turks

direct and mediated exposure to the wide world. Participation
tends to be a consistent lifestyle.

Indeed, where the ratio between the two modes of experience
shows an excessive disjunction, the explanation is likelv to lie
outside the range of newly-acquired information. For example,
more Traditionals expressed opinions about Russia than one would
expect from their general level of information on other questions.
Inspection of these opinions revealed, however, that they derived
not from current information, but rather from the traditional stock
of Turkish folklore. Any question dealing with Russia is likely to
evoke from Traditionals such stock responses under the guise of
current opinions. Respondents were asked first to express a judg-
ment on the policy toward Turkey of several nations, then later
on the peoples of those same nations. Those expressing some defi-
nite opinion are distributed in Table 6.

Table 6 — Opinions on Foreign Policies and Peoples

Expressed Opinion on:

Moderns

Tronsilionafj

Traditionals

Policies! British

92%

83%

51%

American

99

90

60

Russian

99

93

80

Peoples: Brilishers

95

78

45

Americans

98

86

57

Russians

85

82

69

Much of this table is as it should be. There is generally more
opinion of policies, which can be learned from media and media-
oral relays, than of peoples. American policy and people are both
fairly salient in Turkey, as official Americans have been there in
quantity since 1948. That so many Traditionals, in their isolation
from current events, should express definite opinions on Russian
policy and peoples suggested at first some special break-through
by the media system. The content of their opinions indicates,
rather, that the whole folkloristic inventory of traditional sayings
about “the Muscovite” (a symbol used for generations to frighten
naughty Anatolian children) provided their stock of responses on
these ostensibly current questions. Fortunately, there is an inde-
pendent confirmation of this interpretation elsewhere in the inter-
view materials. When asked directly, in a separate set of questions,
whether they had any current information of the Russians, only
2% of the Traditionals claimed such knowledge.

Turkey: Toward the Future

( 141 )

1. From Tradition to Transition

For, in truth, the data just presented on media, news, opinions
show that most Turkish Traditional remain contained within
their familiar little universe of family, mosque, village. They re-
main uncurious about the larger world, unresjionsive to its occa-
sional impingements— so long as they remain occasional, When
die impinging stimuli become too pervasive to be ignored, the
Tradib'onals turn rejective. This is a normal mechanism of ego-
defense for the constrictive personality— defense by total rejection,
rather than by partial incorporation in the expansive Transitional
style. But once such "instinctive” rejection comes to require de-
fensive verbalization, signifying a need for self-reassurance among
the Traditional, then a process of change is under way. A fine ex-
ample of how this phase was operating in 1950, in the village
of Sakaltutan (near Kayseri), has been described by Paul Stirling:

The villagers do not think of the village as a changing society and
children accept their fathers point of view more or less without question.
Although most of the young men have been to the cities and seen the
modem generation of Turkish girls in Western dress about the streets,
and been to American fdms, they state not only to me but to each other
that their own customs are better. The only time I heard the opposite
view it was greeted with a storm of protest . 1

Dr. Stirlings account shows bow, while tradition still rules,
transition gets under way. When people feel obliged to defend
tradition they are no longer simple Tradidonals unaware of alterna-
tives. In Balgat, the villagers vociferously defended the good old
ways against the “infidel” Grocer in public, but went to him pri-
vately for advice on what they should do in Ankara. So, the “storm
of protest” against tire exponent of new ways indicates which way
the wind was blowing in Sakaltutan. In an earlier period the re-
sponsive storm would more likely have taken the form of a chill
indifference. Had the offender persisted beyond tolerable limits,
he might have been condemned as an idiot or punished as a
hereb'e. In neither case would “most of the young men,” as Dr.
Stirling reports, have been likely to “state not only to me but to
each other that their own customs are better.” They would have
felt no such need for mutual self-reassurance.

In villages that remain Traditional, no voices need be raised

( 142 ) The New Turks

to defend traditional ways because no other ways are on the agenda.

It is a distinctive trait of Traditional society that it promotes no
alternatives to itself; hence the corresponding psychic trait of the
Traditional villager is that he lacks “curiosity.” The sense of various-
ness and possibility develops as a specific feature of Modem
society, where changes in the daily round of life are frequent, the
unexpected may happen at any time, and people must be prepared
to make choices . 2 The secular evolution of curiosity as personal
trait and social utility is a phase of modernization closely linked
to the rise of mass communication— which taught large audiences
to ask questions, perhaps more effectively than it taught them to
find answers. It was, again, the highly empathic Grocer of Balgat
who said he preferred American movies because: “They are exciting.
They make you ask, what is going to happen next . . . ?” Everyone
knows what happens next in a traditional folk story— as in most
Turkish movies I have seen.

At different points in the Turkish interviews, respondents were
asked what they would like to know about the world, about various
countries, about specific events they had heard of only vaguely.
The Modems, with the Transitionals just behind them, demon-
strated an abundant curiosity; there were all sorts of questions
they wanted to have answered. The Traditionals, typically, could
find few questions to ask. Most of them said that there wasnt
anything they cared to know. Some, who wished to be polite to
the interviewer, did search out questions to ask. Those were in-
variably personal, often purely sensory, and clearly derived from
immediate concerns of their actual life rather than imaginative
curiosity about life elsewhere. About America, an object of rela-
tively high interest among all Turks, Modems asked big questions
of an impersonal order— involving ideology and social institutions,
general economic conditions, problems of public policy. The Tra-
ditionals asked: “Is it cold there?" . . . “Are the people friendly?’

The Traditional’s incapacity to establish connections between
himself and the larger world is the key to his perspective. His
personality has been socially disciplined to constrict imagination
to the familiar time-space dimensions of his daily life. Even on the
simplest level of generalizing from self to a larger universe, the
trained incapacity of the Traditional is evident. All respondents
were asked to name “your biggest problem,” for example, and there
was marked convergence on economic troubles. But when asked

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 143 )

later to name Turkey’s biggest problem, the Traditionals failed to
generalize as compared with the others.

Table 7 — Generalizing Personal Problems

tcanomlc Problemt

Motl Importontt Modtrns Tranxlflonalt Traditionoh

For ME 64% 59% 67%

for TURKEY 52 21 8

Only one of twelve Traditionals was able to connect his personal
economic problems with those on the national level. It is fair to say
"able” rather than “willing,” for most Traditionals simply did not
name any alternative problem before the nation. Confronted with so
awesome a demand upon their capacities, they fell silent altogether.

The consistent incapacity to link oneself to the outer world
underlay most of the regularly recurring differences among the
respondents. These differences could not be due simply to "national
character,” since all the respondents were Turks. Nor were they
due simply to “class differences” in wealth or status or residence,
since persons similar on these criteria nevertheless were found to
differ in their perspectives. The most satisfactory way of account-
ing for these differences was the personality variable of empathy,
seen as the mode of articulating a person’s governing style of life.
To condense the results which document this theme, we constructed
two sets of indices— on empathy and dysphoria.

Each was tested by a dispersed series of projective questions,
answers to which required the respondent to imagine himself in
an unfamiliar role, place or time. Three questions illustrate the
pattern of response for the entire series. At one point (after he had
identified the biggest problems facing himself and the nation), the
respondent was asked what he would do about these problems if
he were the president of Turkey, This is a role-identification ques-
tion, typically requiring heavy demands upon the self among
pre-Modem persons. At another point a simpler demand was made
upon empatliic capacity: the respondent was asked where he would
choose to live if he had to live elsewhere than Turkey. If he refused
to imagine firing elsewhere, the interviewer probed: “But if you
had to live elsewhere ... I” At still another point, the respondent
was asked how he would feel about living in the United States. This
is the least demanding sort of projective question, since it specifies
part of the alternative situation and can be answered by simple

( 144 ) The New Turks

acceptance or rejection without adding imagined specifications,
The results on these three questions are given in Table 8.

Table 8 — Empathy Index

Ability to Imagine: Moderns Transilionals Traditional)

. . . being Turkish president 86% 63% 35%

. . . living outside Turkey 94 74 49

. . . living in United States 100 98 74

These figures speak, to a certain point, for themselves. It is at
the point where they stop speaking for themselves that the student
of Turkish (or human) behavior must ponder them. It makes
common sense to reflect that, after all, one cannot reasonably expect
to ask an Anatolian (or any other) peasant what he would do as
President and get a comprehensive answer. This is obvious upon
statement. But it is as a start rather than a conclusion that one
needs to take this obvious point. For the figures also show that
some Anatolian peasants, although living in the same social setting
as their silent peers, can answer such questions, i.e., practically
all Transitionals and three out of four Traditionals could imagine
living in the United States.

Clearly, in a more fully developed participant society, most
people can answer all such questions with ease. Recall the circu-
lar letter we mentioned earlier which asked: “Suppose you were
the editor of Time ... F' It assumed that potential subscribers
would not be disturbed and lost, but rather pleased and won,
by the demand that they imagine themselves in a role which
obviously none of them had ever actually experienced. The Ameri-
can assumption is the more striking when compared with results
obtained in the Turkish survey by asking: “What would you do if
you were editor of a newspaper?" Most Traditionals simply could
not imagine what they would want to do. As Turkey approaches
closer to the “modem Western style” it has chosen as its model,
empathy will spread and the number of non-responders on such
questions will be reduced. In a participant society, even the broad
rural and lower-income strata are willing and able to have ideas
on what the President “ought to do,” to imagine living elsewhere
than their birthplace, to express views about the future.

This involves nothing less than a personality transformation
of major proportions. Perhaps the deepest insight the data give into
the gravity of this change is the prevailing dysphoria in the daily

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 145 )

round of life among the Traditionals. The feeling that this must
be so is expressed by their own Traditional proverb: “Our enemies
make us laugh; our friends make us cry.” In the world of the Tra-
ditionals, the sense of life is dull, heavy, gloomy. “Never have I
seen such a colorless, shapeless dump. The main color is gray . . .”
wrote the Ankara-bred interviewer Tosun on his first exposure to
Balgat. The dysphoric tonality of Traditional life for those who
live it is documented by another set of questions. One asked simply,
and in quite general fashion, whether the respondent felt himself
to be "happy or unhappy.” Another, much later, asked what his
reaction had been to the last piece of news he had received. A third
asked what the respondent felt he could do to help solve Turkey's
problems. The responses are given in Table 9.

Table 9 — Dysphoria Index

Moderns

Tronsitlonals

Trad! ft ona!s

Feels unhappy generally

15%

20%

33%

Fell unhappy about Iasi news

(1. e., lad, sorry, angry)

39

46

62

Feels unable io help solve

Turkey's problems

45

53

86

The complex of gloom condensed by these figures is difficult
to reconstruct for those who live in a participant society fashioned
in the century of optimism with the ideology of progress. Clarity
on how we evaluate this is therefore essential. Nowhere on this
page or in this volume is tire implication intended that Modernity
is utopian or that Americans, as the most modem people in the
sense we use this term, are therefore the best and happiest. Neither
by this caveat is the contrary intended. There is simply no net
judgment of tin's order made or needed in this book. What our
study underscores is that Modernity and Tradition are even more
radically different from each other than is commonly acknowledged,
that bridging the difference hinges upon a transformation of per-
sonality along with a remaking of institutions, that this modernizing
process is underway among a large number of Middle Easterners.
Our data on happiness show why so many Middle Easterners
are willing to undergo the difficult process of modernization—
they simply are too unhappy with the old traditional ways to resist
an opportunity to try something new.

The first line of Table 9 tells us that one of every three Tradi-

( 146 ) The New Turks

tionals declares himself to be an unhappy person, a proportion very
much higher than among the other types. The second line has
special relevance for communication. When a person is asked to
tell the last piece of news he heard, a complex screening process
is activated— i.e., selective recall from a selective memory which
has selectively stored the original selective perceptions of the re-
spondents. That two of every three Traditionals, as a regular out-
come of this process, select for recall a "last piece of news” which
made them feel unhappy is a solid indication that sadness is the
dominant tonality of their setting, that dysphoria is the approved
and expected mood. What one “recalls” of the news is also what one
uses as subject matter of conversation with friends and acquaint-
ances. The prevailing gloominess of Turkish village conversation
(as indeed of its “popular” movies and press) is documented by
this result.

It reflects also the fearful views of the outside world that interact
with the overwhelming pessimism about the future, and the helpless
futility of efforts to make it better, as expressed in the third line.
The Modem impetus to make a better world is absent from the
Traditional psyche, because Modem confidence that such a world
is feasible is absent from its perspective. In obeisance to the fatalistic
rule of Kismet, the Traditional lives under the narcosis of resigna-
tion. Roughly nine of ten Traditionals felt that neither they per-
sonally nor “people like them” could do anything to help solve
their own or Turkey’s problems.

To transform passivity of this order into a sense of participation
takes some doing, but we have seen that the Turkish Republic has
been doing it at its own pace. It is clearly the case that, by objective
measures, Traditionals in Turkey are decreasing and Transitionals
are increasing. Less obvious, in any detail, is the personality trans-
formation entailed by the institutional changes. Our understanding
of the results reported above becomes more vivid when we see
how the general themes articulate themselves in particular cases.
An illuminating terrain is the reaction to new sorts of information,
particularly those messages distinctively carried through the de-
veloping mass media. We turn, then, to a closer look at some in-
dividual cases which illustrate the general propositions.

Turkey: Toward the Future

2. Constriction and Communication

A first item to note is the response made to the interview situa-
tion itself. Balgat illustrates two main ways of responding that are
quite characteristic. The Grocer sought to make the interview an
occasion for psychic rapprochement with the Modem young inter-
viewer Tosun; he “evidently wished to feel that he is closer to me
than he is to the other villagers.” Along with this, the Grocer
answered all questions freely and fully. The Chief, however, re-
mained wholly disengaged from the urban interviewer— neither
friendly, nor hostile, but simply observant and self-contained. He
answered questions with regard only to his own interests rather
than Tosun’s. Hence the Chief, as interviewee, was a man of few
words on many subjects and many words on a few subjects.

The intent of these remarks goes beyond their limited relevance
to the technique of interviewing. The manner in which persons
perceive the interview situation is a datum on their readiness and
competence to participate personally in essentially impersonal
social enterprises. It is axiomatic among American communication
specialists that most Americans are not at all intimidated by opinion
surveys which demand their views on great men and great matters
well outside their actual experience. On this axiom is constructed
the American advertising industry, unparalleled in history as an
economic institution and also as a communication agency for en-
ticing personal participation in American society. Living in such
a setting, Americans seem to find few demands upon their empathic
capacity exorbitant. When interview technicians discuss the ques-
tions they will ask a "national cross-section,” it rarely occurs to
them to worry about the limits beyond which American imagination
will not function in principle. The population is accustomed to
projecting themselves into strange roles and situations, and they
enjoy exercising their skill. Indeed, a more common complaint
about opinion polls heard among ordinary Americans is that the
pollsters do not get around to them. 3

The contrast with the social psychology of the interview situa-
tion among Turks is striking. How little they perceive the essential
impersonality of the situation is clear from the excessive preoccupa-
tion of Turkish interviewees with what the interviewers might
think of them. With extraordinary frequency, for example, inter-

( 148 ) The New Turks

viewers were thanked profusely for their personal interest. Said
one 47-year old illiterate villager after a three-hour interrogation:
"You are the nicest effendt I have ever known. No other effendi
has ever cared to know my thoughts on so many things.” The
meaning of impersonal communication simply has not penetrated
in such measure that question-and-answer can be handled, psycho-
logically, as a game.

In participant societies, where the mass media have taught
people how to communicate socially without being personally
"engaged,” the question-and-answer game is played with uninhibited i
pleasure by the populace (witness the “vox populi” feature in most
newspapers and the “quiz show” that dominates radio-TV pro-
gramming). Among Traditional Turks, who have not yet learned
the participant style taught by the mass media, the situation of
question-and-answer is deadly earnest. Words count for much, we
have seen, with the Traditionals; and one does not speak lightly
on weighty matters. Consider the following array of responses to
the question where one would live if he could not live in Turkey:

I could not live in any other place. (Why?) Because I love Turkey.
(If you were forced to leave Turkey?) I would kill myself. (001: House-
maid, age 25, illiterate, poor) 0

God forbid! I would rather die than live somewhere else than in
Turkey. (Why?) Because this is our country. (021: Worker, age 30,
illiterate, destitute)

I would rather die than live. I would not want to go anywhere. If
all go I would go. If nobody goes I would choose death. (089: House-
wife, age 24, illiterate, poor)

Would not want to live in any other country. I cannot leave my
people. Wherever my nation is I want to be there. (If you had to got)
Nowhere. I would rather die. (116: Horsewagon Driver, age 29, illiter-
ate, poor) .

I would rather prefer to die. (127: Fanner, age 58, illiterate, poor)

I would rather die. (186: Doctor, age 53, college, moderate)

These respondents exhibit one common trait: they can more
easily imagine destroying the self than making the effort to project
it beyond the familiar world into the strange. In the foregoing
quotations we deliberately chose a wide spread of sociological
characteristics (sex, age, occupation, education, economic status)

° For each quotation, the interview number of the respondent is given,
along with his occupation, age, education, economic status. The latter JS
scored on a five-point scale: destitute, poor, moderate, well-off, rich.

Turkey: Toward the Future { 149 )

to emphasize that this is a psychological trait It recurs wherever
a constrictive personality is found, even when the personality
belongs to a college-educated doctor in fair economic circum-
stances. But the incapacity to take questions casually, to project
"impersonally” into the situations they define, is especially marked
in that social setting where Traditionals are the rule.

Constrictiveness, moreover, is more than a "trait.” It is a "self-
system,” in Harry Stack Sullivan’s phrase, a consistent way of
organizing one’s self-defenses against the threatening beyond.
Consider the 30-year old worker, illiterate and destitute in his
village near the Black Sea, who invoked God and death to save
himself from the apparently worse fate of imagining himself living
elsewhere. His tone on questions of the projective order ranged
from the laconic to the shrill; but his underlying response never
deviated from the evasive and rejective. He was terrified by the
question as to what he would do if he were President of Turkey
and again invoked God to preserve him from ever thinking of such
a tiling. He was less intensely agitated by the questions as to what
ho would do if he were editor of a paper or manager of a radio
station; but he still replied, though without seeking aid from the
Deity, that it would be “unseemly” for him to imagine himself
doing such tilings. Even when asked what he considered the biggest
problems facing Turkey, this man, raised in a coastal village across
the Black Sea from the Soviet Union, could only reply: “I don’t
know.” By this time he had probably been intimidated and ex-
hausted by the interview situation.

For it is evident that tin's young man has not been trained to
receive, retain, and relay opinions about the world outside his
daily round of life. He is not interested in things foreign; when
asked what he would like to know about other lands he replied:
"Nothing.” When asked his impressions of various foreign peoples,
he said: “I don't know; they are all infidels.” Indeed, in the whole
series of questions dealing with mediated news of the world external
to his village, the one positive expression was that he sometimes
liked to listen to the newspaper being read. ’Why? “They tell things
in a nice way, everything about governors, commandants, officials.”
When probed further about his interest in these important people,
he continued (under continuous stimulation) as follows:

Yes. They arc big. They do big things. (Why do these big things
interest you?) They are our leaders. What would happen to us if some-

( 150 ) The New Turks

thing would happen to them? (What would happen?) We would all
be lost. We could not do a thing without them. (Why not?) They are
our masters. We all depend on them.

This illiterate Black Sea worker still perceives politics in the non-
participant way which prevailed through the Ottoman centuries.
Then, as we have seen, the messages that counted were prescriptive,
usually dealt with war and taxes, and typically originated in the
Sultanate. From the center “news” was relayed through controlled
channels to fixed points on the circumference. Whatever the Sultan
( or his spokesmen ) chose to define as news was news— his engage-
ment in a war, his travels through the lands, the state of his health.
The outer world of space and time were defined by the moments
of the monarch.

Just so, the Black Sea worker thinks of the newspaper solely
as a way of being informed, at appropriate distance, about the
doings of “our masters” without whom “we would all be lost.” The
newspaper for him is no vehicle of opinion, neither for hearing
those of others nor for selecting some to make his own. What would
a man want with an opinion if his fate is in any case decided for
him by those whose proper role it is to decide such matters? Opinion
is simply irrelevant in such a perspective. All he wants is a court
chronicle of those great men on whom “we all depend."

The irreality of psychic participation (opinion) without a sense
of political participation is very clear to the Traditionals. A 48- year
old cobbler, bom and raised in the Izmir province, replicates the
pattern of the 30-year old Black Sea worker. He does not go to
movies or listen to the radio. Nor, though he claims to be literate,
does he read newspapers. He is not interested in world news, nor
in local-regional news. His only news interest is to learn, in small
doses, about the doings of the central government. This interest
is focused clearly on “our masters” rather than “my opinions.
When asked whether he ever heard controversies over die news,
he mentioned recently witnessing an argument between two ac-
quaintances over the wisdom of sending Turkish troops to Korea,
When asked what he thought of this, the cobbler replied: A silly
argument. Nobody is asking our opinion. There are learned people.
They know what is right and what is wrong better than we do.

The Traditional does not participate in shaping public policy;
nor does he feel that he “should” (is expected to) participate; nor

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 151 )

is lie particularly interested in (desirous of) participating. For
him enlightenment signifies incuriosity and practical wisdom coun-
sels ignorance. The 58-year old fanner, who was very firm in his
conviction that he missed nothing by ignoring the radio, stated
the case for constriction very concisely: “Even if I had enough
money, I would not buy a radio. (Why?) I don’t like too much
news.” He dismissed all imaginative fiction as “nonsense stuff and
not real.” His interest in media was restricted to but a single cate-
gory: “I like to listen while my son reads the Korean war news. I
get excited and even with my old age I want to go there and fight.”
The Traditional’s only public role is to fight; the rest is not his
affair. The 29-year old horsewagon driver echoed these sentiments
of tlie fanner twice his age in a different province. On the question
whether he missed anything by ignoring newspapers and radio,
he said: “I lose nothing because I am not interested in things which
do not concern me,”

Throughout the Traditional interviews resonates this empty
space between the private and the public arenas, this zero or near-
zero contact between oneself and the larger world. The Traditional
cares nothing, wants nothing, can do nothing about this world.
Particularly poignant is the resignation of Traditional women, dis-
turbed about their menfolk in Korea, who repeat solemnly they
can do nothing about this. In modem society, where war is per-
ceived in many dimensions and policy alternatives are publicly
debated, women can and do express opinions on recruitment and
rotation policies, rationing and price control, and an array of other
“issues.” The Traditional Turkish women can only wait and pray
while the men fight.

The praying-female and fighting-male postures are classic in
the Traditional repertory of personal deportment. They activate
the intense feelings of dependence upon authority we have noted,
and provide the major outlet for aggressiveness in the Traditional
system of values which codifies rational behavior for a “courage
culture.” The self-imagery of Turks in this dimension is widespread
and persistent When asked for two words best describing the
peoples of different lands, the Turks identified themselves mainly
in terms of bravery and loyalty, the most compulsive symbols of a
"courage culture.” This emphasis is univocal, of course, among the
Traditionals. Every one of the persons quoted above, who would

( 152 ) The New Turks

sooner imagine suicide then leaving Turkey, responded to this
question with two words in the following list: “brave, heroic,
fighters, unafraid, honest, true.” But these values persist, as words
often do, after their references have changed, even among Turks
who have passed beyond 'the Traditional orbit of life. That the
Turkish social setting still showed many traditional elements, in
1950, is indicated by the distribution of symbols among the entire
sample.

Table JO — Symbols of Peoples

Turks

Americans

British

Brave

120

Industrious

59

Cold

56

Loyal

57

Kind

58

Sober

34

All others

128

All others

122

All others

96

305

239

186

Russians

French

Wicked

45

Gay

41

Cruel

41

Pleasure-loving

34

All others

84

All others

46

170

121

N.B. As many of the 259 respondents could not think of two words (or even one word),
no column reaches the maximum possible total of 518 choices.

These results fit well Lord Macaulay’s brilliant distinction
between “courage cultures” and “ingenuity cultures,” whereby he
sought to explain the high moral tone of prevailing opposition in
a still medieval Italy to the modem perspectives of Machiavelli.
The Machiavellian behavioral code based on ingenious success
formulae struck his contemporaries as “unseemly” for loyal men
and “unworthy” of brave men. 4 Even today, when Turks wish to
express positive sentiments toward others, they do so in the affiliated
symbolism of courage-loyalty. When they wish to express hostility,
as toward the Russians, they merely transpose courage into “cruelty.
Conspicuously absent from these Turkish judgments is the symbol-
ism of ingenuity. It seems less relevant to one’s judgment of a
people whether they are intelligent, efficient, successful. This con-
trasts sharply with the judgments expressed by people living in
more modem societies, among whom, as shown by UNESCO sur-
veys of national stereotypes, the symbolism of ingenuity-success
plays the most active role. 5 It contrasts also with the perspectives
of fhp Mori pm CPrfmor\f* ivrifb in 1 Pi v mLo. .

Turkey: Toward the Future

3. Modems: The Big Picture

The Traditionals compose a very substantial proportion of the
Turkish population, well over half even today. But they neither
have nor seek a shaping influence over the Turkish future. The
"creative minority” of Modems, perhaps now 10% of the population,
provided tire elite that shaped Turkey’s recent past and model its
future. These are the urban, educated, relatively well-off Turks
who run all of the government (still a virtual monopoly of top
power) and most of the private enterprises. These control and
consume the largest shares of the social values that are highly
prized, e.g., income, safety, deference. 0

The Modem link between mediated communication and per-
sonal perspective is implicated in the response of a 22-year old
Turkish student, when asked what sort of paper he would run if
he were its editor:

A paper that will interest the whole world. I believe that we will
have a world government one day in the future. There will be no
border barriers ... I would introduce the backward areas of the world
to the whole humanity. I would tell about their customs and ways and
generally about their life. I would boost the idea of traveling all around
the world.

No rejection or evasion here; no dumb silence or frightened retreat
before the "unseemly” question. This young Modem speaks in a
language which would sound natural to a student World Federalist
anywhere. But it would surely sound strange to Traditionals in his
own country, whose morality requires compulsive loyalty to family,
mosque, and nation.

Alongside this ready identification with the "whole world” and
"whole humanity” goes an equal facility at rearranging the self-
system on short notice. Once an expansive personality incorporates
such global symbols and abstract entities, the empathic mechanisms
become stalled in orienting rapidly to new situations and unfamiliar
roles. The modems have no difficulty imagining themselves as
President of Turkey. By comparison with the blank and frightened
replies of most Traditionals, their responses to this question are
ready and full:

I would adjust the taxes according to social justice. ... To base the
economic policy on a liberal doctrine. I would like the government to

( 154 ) The New Turks

do things private enterprise cannot do. . . . To follow a peaceful foreign
policy, basing my actions on the UN Charter. (020: Lawyer, 22, college,
moderate)

To have safety from aggression, I would try to have friendlier rela-
tions with other countries. To make the country better its standard of
living. I would give wide scope to foreign capital and safeguard it. To
modernize our agriculture and organize it in the shortest possible time.
(138; Tobacco merchant, 40, high school, moderate)

I wouldn’t have obligatory universal military training. I would ease
the customs law. I would give more freedom to the press. (027: student,
22, college, moderate)

I would defend the idea of a preventive war. (030: Government Of-
ficial, 37, college, moderate)

I would raise the standard of living. I would try to wipe out the
illiteracy and raise the cultural standard. Take steps to make the newly-
established democracy in our country permanent. Separate matters of
religion from matters of state. (029: Businessman, 40, high school,
well-off)

I would try to have a strong army. I would build good roads in every
section of tire country. I would give big importance to the air force. 1
would try to give the people an easier way of life. I would have a
strong police to take care of thefts and murders and such. (095: Butcher,
51, grammar school, moderate)

I would give farm machinery to the farmers. I would irrigate the dry
land. I would build factories. I would work night and day to better the
living conditions of the country. I would lower the unnecessary taxes.
I would provide jobs for the unemployed. (120: Mason, 49, high school,
moderate)

These attitudes are found mainly among the younger, urban,
relatively well-off, and educated minority. But, here again, the
responses were selected to show that high empathy is essentially a
personal characteristic that occurs among groups that are socio-
logically diversified. It is found among 40-year old businessmen
and 50-year old artisans (butcher, mason) as well as 20-year old
lawyers and students. This spread of empathy is facilitated in soci-
eties where mediated communication is available to supplement, or
replace, the "big picture” of the world elsewhere acquired only
through higher education.

Modem Turks, then, are on familiar terms with the world. They
exhibit die cosmopolitan perspectives which identify the modem
style everywhere. This appears in their remarks about the countries
other than Turkey in which they might choose to live. No Modem
would rather die than live elsewhere. Indeed, many Modems
express willingness (even desire) to live in various foreign places—

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 155 )

and for very cogent reasons. For example, a radio announcer said
that he would like to live in France because of the “elite environ-
ment”:

There— I believe— in Paris, exists the choicest little cultural society
in the world. (123: 20, college, well-off)

Another Modem would like to live in the United States for reasons
that suggest the “Transitional” path by which he came to hold his
present views (the compulsive avoidance of dirt; the desirous
attraction to wealth):

They have a clean and rich life there. I like to live among rich people.
(094 : 39, Grammar school, moderate)

Reasons equally characteristic of the Modem style are given
for not wanting to live in certain foreign countries. Instead of such
blanket condemnations as “all foreigners are infidels,” which recur
frequently among Traditionals, the responses of the Modems are
specific rather than stereotypical. One student gives a direct "com-
munication” reason for not wanting to live in Soviet Russia:

Wc don’t know what is happening behind die Iron Curtain. I
would not like to live in a place I couldn’t get any information about,
(077: 28, college, moderate)

Such concern for information would hardly occur to the Traditional,
who does not participate in the communication network even within
his own country. Only to the Modem perception would it occur
naturally to use a phrase like “Iron Curtain” to designate the re-
pression of public information, for only Modems sense this lack
as something almost physical.

From intense participation in the communication network de-
rives a heightened awareness of the interaction between Self and
Others. Indeed, some Modem Turks reveal the same sensitivity
to what others know and think about them as do the “other-
directed” persons whom David Riesman has characterized as the
prevailing modem type in America . 7 A young merchant is dis-
satisfied with American attitudes toward Turkey because:

They know something about Turkey of 30 years ago, and think we
arc still back there, in spite of the tremendous changes that have taken
place. (085: 37, high school, well-off)

He is not alone in his concern that Turkish “modernization” should

( 156 ) The New Turks

be recognized. An educated housewife is equally pained with
Americans for the same reason:

Most of them don’t even know of our existence, and some who do
know think we are living in the days of our ancestors. (042: 36, college
moderate)

These views reveal a common sensitivity to public attitudes in the
West, including the use of modernism as a standard of judgment.
A tobacco executive even declares that he would not like to live
in Britain or America because these countries are not modern
enough:

I don’t like conservatism. They are the same people they were 500
years ago. (138: 40, high school, moderate)

Not many Modem Turks are quite so defensively sophisticated.
Some take very literally the communication content to which they
are exposed and these appear to be a little old-fashioned. An
agricultural engineer, for example, explains his desire to live in
the U. S. A. thus:

Ever since I was a child I used to dream and think about people. I
used to imagine all people equal, having nice homes. In my imagination
I used to send their children to school and educated them. Now, as an
adult, I know that America is that country I used to dream about.
(014: 36, college, moderate)

Other Modems respond in the qualified fashion of people who
know too much to give simple answers to complex questions. A
35-year old doctor would like to live in the United States because:

My profession is very advanced there. I could speak freely and air
my views the way I wish.

On the other hand, he considers American policy toward Turkey
unsatisfactory and he is quite articulate about his reasons why:

Turkey is the most vulnerable country for a Russian attack. That is
why they did not accept us into the Atlantic Pact. In this way the Ameri-
cans spoiled a perfect chance of having a fortress against the Russians.
. . . Also their capitalists are using us for exploitation. They give miserable
prices for our tobacco. They act as if we were an American colony.

These two statements show the Modem differentiating skill in
relating self to others. The modems can identify readily with a

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 157 )

variety of foreign countries, can imagine themselves living else-
where for a variety of reasons, can distinguish between policies and
peoples, can differentiate their personal from their political identi-
ties, This doctor can admire Americans for professional and per-
sonal reasons, while rejecting American policy. Traditionals do
not make such distinctions.

A few Turkish Modems have learned to empathize so skillfully
that imagination carries diem betjond familiar reality to its shadowy
periphery. Such Turks exliibit a Weltmuhe and cafard that is found
more commonly among certain "ultra-modem” types of Europeans.
Bom and raised in Istanbul families long intimate with European
ways, educated at the Sorbonne and infected witii the rive gauche
legends of van Gogh and Gauguin, these ultra-modem Turks find
the strenuous efforts of national modernization a bit tiresome and
plebeian. One such respondent would like to live in Tibet, another
in Tahiti. A third does not even require anything so concrete as a
place-name, but can project himself into a purely abstract idea of
remoteness. To die question where he would like to live, this banker
replied simply: "On a small island, far away and empty.” His
reason indicates the wcltfremd attitude which has become familiar
in die modem West as the "problem of alienation.” He would not
like to live anywhere else than his empty and remote island because:

There is not much difference between any populated and so-called
civilized city in the world. I have seen most of them and have not been
impressed. (042: college, well-off)

The perspective of modem Turks is very clearly related to their
specific attitudes toward communications. Contrast the habitual
apathy tou'ard news among Traditional Turks with this educated
merchant’s explanation of his interest in foreign news:

I want to know what is happening. I want to get different opinions
on it, and get a clear and unbiased idea. I want to find out where die
world is heading. (143: 55, college, well-off)

This might well stand as a concise summary of the modem view
of news and the function of public information transmitted through
mass media. The notion that “the world is heading” somewhere
underlies modem notions of a "big picture.” Unlike traditional
eschatology, which saw the world as heading toward some pre-
ordained doom or golden age located in a hereafter, the modem

( 158 ) The New Turks

perspective sees history as a “secular process” in which events are
related to each other in a sequence that can be analyzed and even
altered by living observers.

Another Modem attitude toward the press is a young house-
wife’s response that, if she were editor of a newspaper:

I would run an opposition paper. I would be in opposition to the
party in power, whichever it might be! I would criticize. That’s the main
function of the paper. (078: 28, college, moderate)

The Modem constellation of attitudes appears also in their
comments about radio. As compared with the Traditionals’ com-
pulsive loyalty to the old and familiar, the Modem Turk shares
the pervasive desire for novelty and variety which marks the modem
style everywhere. When asked why he prefers the BBC to domestic
stations (which he considers “not worth a damn”), a student replies
“Novelty.” This orientation is further illustrated by his explanation
why the war news, at first novel, no longer interests him:

This last war has lasted over ten years and ... I am bored. (037:
college, moderate)

A mechanical engineer prefers American musical programs (AFN)
to Turkish because of their “Variety— new songs as well as old
ones.” Asked what he would do if he were a station manager, he
replies:

I would first make a poll to determine the needs of the people. (023:
25, college, well-off)

Here, incarnate, is the modem attitude toward communication—
“feedback” and all.

Another aspect of the modem style— what Veblen called “con-
spicuous consumption”— is revealed in the comment of a housewife:

Everybody who is somebody listens regularly to the news. (075: 48,
college, well-off)

The modem middle-class view is generalized by a student, who
explains why Americans have the best entertainment programs:

It is the result of free enterprise and democracy. This is too deep to
go into, but I can say that free enterprise gives the best firing conditions
and money will always buy the best entertainment. Therefore the Ameri-
cans have the best programs. (077: 28, college, moderate)

A final aspect of the modem style in communication behavior

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 159 )

among these respondents is their "propaganda tis”— their alertness
to source and method in their foreign news . 8 A housewife appraises
the BBC’s vigilance against verifiable inaccuracies, displaying a
truly modem sense of relevant evidence and tentative conclusions;

Up to the present the BBC lias been a reliable source. They never
say anytlung that is liable to blow back into their faces. (005: 26, col-
lege, moderate)

A merchant, making explicit a typical reaction of propaganda-
allergic modem listeners to "loaded” presentations, prefers the
BBC because:

They give bad news as well as good news and thus make me feel
that they are not trying to shape the facts so that news favors their side.
They always give you both sides of the argument. (085: 27, high school,
well-off)

Preference for “both sides of the argument” is a Modem notion
limited, even in the most developed societies, to relatively small
segments of die population. A valuable set of experiments has
shown that this trait develops mainly among habitual participants
in the communication network. Americans whose media exposure
Is only occasional are more likely to be persuaded by the vigorous
presentation of a “one-sided” case. It is among those Americans for
whom media exposure is a regular part of daily life, and who are
therefore likely to be exposed to the countervailing arguments in
due course, that the presentation of “both sides” is a condition of
persuasion . 0

Wien media participation attains this degree of subtle dis-
crimination and supple responsiveness, then the society contains
a cadre of Modem persons who shape its opinion arena. The Modem
Turks, who today view the world around them in terms of “the
big picture,” provide the model toward which flow the aspirations
and energies of those who will shape its future. We turn, finally,
to a closer look at those Transitionals who are making their way
in the modernizing stream.

4. Transitionals: The Widening World

Between the Traditionals firmly rooted in the ways of the
Ottoman past and the Modems, who have incorporated die “modem
Western” style that Atatiirk publicized as a model, there is the

( 160 ) The New Turks

substantial number (perhaps 30%) of Turks who have been labeled
Transitional. These individuals no longer exhibit the constrictive
personality and compulsive empathy of their traditionalized coun-
trymen, but they have not yet achieved the expansive cosmopolitan
style of the Modems. They are men in motion, and they have in
common both the direction and mode of their mobility.

The Transitional Turks are in process of self-transformation.
They are persons marked by aspirations for a future which will be
better than the past, but they have not yet acquired a comprehensive
set of new values to replace the old. Hence they exhibit ambivalent
feelings about the choices between old and new which must be
made along the way. It is this conflict of values— continued loyalty
to the old, growing desire for the new— which differentiates the
decisions and shapes the behavior of the Transitionals. The conflict
exhibits various forms. Sometimes ambivalence takes the form of
uncertainty and indecision. For example, whereas Modem re-
spondents have clear and definite opinions about foreign countries,
one young Transitional student responded as follows to the question
whether he would like to live in America:

I am not sure about this country. Things I hear differ so much. Some
people love it— progress, technique, and all. Some find the people dull,
suffocating, without individuality— too specialized, with no wide range
of interests. I don’t think it would be the worst place to choose. Anyhow,
it would be a great risk, because once you get there you are stuck.

While modernized enough to be interested, differentiating and
critical, he has not yet acquired the sense of uninhibited mobility
which underlies the experimental perspective of the genuine Mod-
em. He is “not sure”— a move would involve too great a “risk”; if
it didn’t work one would be “stuck.” The notion that one can “try
it out” without completely engaging oneself, the sense of tentative
exploration in which both psyche and soma are only partially com-
mitted and can easily be withdrawn, this medical student has not
yet acquired.

Ambivalence also takes the form of self-contradictory prefer-
ences. On the same question, a 54-year old doorman said first
that he would not live anywhere else than Turkey. Probed by the
interviewer, he next said: “If I had to live elsewhere, I would live
in a Muslim country.” The religious motivation appeared to be
paramount in his explanation. But further discussion elicited the

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 161 )

contradictory response that he would live in the United States.
Why? Because: “I hear that everybody there is rich."

Among younger Transitionals, ambivalence often shows itself
in incompleteness and inconsistency of attitudinal structures. Such
persons exhibit modem views on various matters, but do not carry
them through to their logical— or, more cogently, psychological-
consequences. They abandon these views midway and often, as
a result, present curious lacunae in their perspectives. A taxi driver,
for example, would like to live in America "because life, I hear,
is much easier there.” When asked what he would like to know
about tire country, he replies: “All I want to know is how to get
there. Once I am there, I am sure I can manage.” This is the
perspective of modem man, activist agent of his own destiny, with
none of the fatalism and quietism which prevails among Traditional
Turks.

Quite a different picture emerges, however, from the same man’s
responses to other projective questions. Asked what he would sug-
gest to improve domestic radio programs, he replies: “ Who am I
to criticize the whole nation’s radio?” Asked what he would do
if he were manager of the radio station, he replies:

What a question againl I don’t know how to deal with my own
business and you ask me what I would do with the radio house. . . .
I listen when nnd if they play, and what they play I have to listen to
and be thankful. (047: 36, Grammar school, poor)

This is rather the voice of the obedient Traditional, passive mem-
ber of an environment in which most important decisions are made
by his betters and are quiescently enacted by him. It is illuminating
that his inconsistency comes between facility at empathizing in
space nnd unreadiness to project himself in status.

Unlike the Traditional Turks who regard their station in life
as "given” them by an allocation from Allah, tin's young taxi driver
docs have aspirations for a better life— he could be called “upwardly
mobile.” Only, to achieve these aspirations he would have to get
out of the society in which his self-image has been traditionalized.
Tin's may account for the note of activism and self-confidence that
enters his response when he imagines getting on in America: "Once
I am there, I am sure I can manage.” No talk, at tin's point, that "I
don’t know how to deal with my own business.”

The root difficulty of many Transitional Turks is this conflict

( 162 ) The New Turks

between new aspirations and old traditions. To satisfy the desires
without violating the loyalties it often seems necessary to go
somewhere else than where one is. The historic link between physi-
cal and psychic mobility thus reappears in the changing Turkish
society of today. It is epitomized by the Balgat Grocer who had
his “eye at the higher places,” but felt that to achieve his ambitions
he would have to “get out of this hole” and move to the city. The
taxi driver, who also desires an “easier life,” feels that he would
have to leave his city and go to America to get it. This situation
is typical for Transitionals.

Some Transitionals have found neither opportunity nor courage
to seize this dilemma firmly by the horns; these continue in am-
bivalent suspension between desires and compulsions. Many try,
somehow, to slip between the horns by small-scale movements. Even
this, however, means changing the locale in which one has been
traditionalized in order to achieve the new conditions one desires.
Hence, most Transitionals are men-in-motion. Of a Transitional
group studied closely, a majority were bom in villages or small
towns, but nearly all now reside in or near urban centers. This move
from country to city is characteristic of modernization throughout
recent history. It is interesting, too, that more Transitionals have
moved toward Ankara, the Anatolian city, than toward cosmopolitan
Istanbul. It seems appropriate that Transitionals should tend toward
an environment intermediate between the traditional hinterlands
and the cosmopolis.

Restlessness and striving are fairly widespread among Transi-
tionals on the move. Responding to the direct question: “In gen-
eral, how do you feel about your life?” one out of every five
Transitionals described himself as “fairly unhappy” or “very un-
happy.” When next asked: “What makes you feel this way? nearly
two-thirds gave reasons based on the inadequacy of their material
resources. Most of these are employed in cities; some are still on
farms. In both cases, they tend largely to be dissatisfied with how
they make their living and how much they make.

In explaining their discontent in economic terms, the Transi-
tionals differed sharply from the Traditionals, who mainly^ gave
reasons for unhappiness classifiable as “fatalism and religion. The
Transitionals revealed also a characteristic ambivalence on religion.
Two of every three Transitionals had, on a direct question, asserted
their religious beliefs to be quite important to them. On the be-

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 163 )

havioral level, however, these beliefs seem to have lost their
directive force; and it may be that, in these matters, actions speak
louder than words. For example, whereas most Traditionals go to
the mosque “very often," nearly two-thirds of all Transitionals
(including half of those who claimed religious beliefs to be im-
portant to them) said they “seldom” or "never” go to the mosque.
Among those whose piety has faltered, reasons for discontent were
almost always explained in “material” rather than "spiritual” terms.
Secularization shows itself in the cleavage between inherited doc-
trines and acquired desires.

This cleavage opens one gap through which psychic mobility
has spread. On the question: “What is the biggest personal prob-
lem for people in the same circumstances as yourself?” 72% of all
Transitionals gave responses classifiable as economic. They were
next asked: “What can you do about it?” Compared with the over-
whelming passivity and fatalism of the Traditionals, relatively
few Transitionals said merely "nothing.” Even among those who
made no specific suggestions for action, two-thirds gave some cogent
reason why he personally could not cope effectively with the prob-
lem he had specified. Some attributed ineffectiveness to their status,
others to their lack of requisite skills, and the largest number to an
analysis of the “nature of the problem.” A fairly large minority of
those who answered, however, did put forward some concrete idea
as to appropriate action they might take.

This qualify of activism differentiates the Transitionals from the
Traditionals and relates them to the Modem Turks. The difference
shows in their views as to what can be done about the "biggest
problem facing Turkey,” as each respondent had himself defined
this problem in a preceding question. A substantial minority of
the Transitionals had some quite definite proposal as to what
could be done to solve the biggest problem. On another question
—what they would do if head of the Turkish government— only a
rare Transitional exhibited the complete lack of empathy which
was so pervasive among Traditionals. About one-third of the Transi-
tionals who gave some response were unable to follow this up by
imagining the concrete measures they would take in this august
role; but the rest, like the Modems, put forward quite specific
programs for action. Of these, by far the greatest number were
classifiable as "economic measures.”

These characteristics sharply differentiate the process of opinion-

( 164 ) The New Turks

formation among the Transitionals. Quite consistently they express
more varied opinions on more varied subjects, and in more positive
fashion, than do their Traditional compatriots. To exhibit these
consistencies, we compared the over-all responsiveness of the three
types on the total interview schedule, with results shown in Table
11. First we computed the average number of respondents on all
42 questions which had been asked of all interviewees. This pro-
cedure made the Traditionals appear to be more responsive than
if we had counted the answers to all questions— since they had not
been asked many questions precisely because of their nonresponsive-
ness on preceding “filter” questions. Despite this advantage, tire
frequency of response among Traditionals is significantly lower,
as shown in the first row of Table 11. Next we averaged, for each
type, the number of responses given on all 19 questions to which
each respondent could give as many answers as he wished— e.g.,
when asked to enumerate his preferred radio programs. On such
questions each additional item enlarges and diversifies the re-
spondent’s area of choice. The results are shown as Variety of
Response in the second row. Finally we compared the types on
all 13 questions calling for a single definite response on some sub-
stantive public issue (e.g., “What should be done about poverty?”).
Here we differentiated noncommital responses (e.g., “Something
should be done”) from those which committed the respondent to
some definite opinion ( e.g., “The government should control prices/
raise wages/subsidize farmers/ etc.”). We then computed the aver-
age of commital responses, with results shown in the third row
of Table 11.

Table 11 — Components of Opinion Formation

Modern s

Transitionals

Traditionals

Frequency of Response

95%

88%

73%

Variety of Response

49

42

32

Commitment of Response

87

83

77

In every case the Transitionals disengaged themselves consistently
from the Traditionals and positioned themselves closer to the
Modems. Though a substantial proportion of them are still rural
persons with low earnings in poor jobs, they have gained mobility
through their literacy (see Table 1). Extending their distance from
the Traditionals through the “mobility multiplier” of mass media

Turkey: Toward the Future ( 165 )

(see Tables 2, 5) they steadily draw closer to the thoughtways of
the Modems.

By way of resume, then, die Modems, already within the audi-
ence for mass communication, are the currently active element in
Turkish society. The Traditionals, on the other hand, are the
quiescent segment of the society and do not participate significantly
in either the new communications or other modernizing institu-
tions, Huy do not attend to the output of the mass media; nor
do they, in the normal course of events, want to think or do much
about the problems these media describe. The Transitionals, moving
from traditional ways toward a modem style, are the new source
of social energy for the future. 10 It is they who are likely to bring
into Turkish life the newer currents of thought and action that
may emerge in the next years and decades. This probability gives
the Transitionals their special significance both for communication
and for social change.

They are acquiring psychic mobility, a personal capacity to
identify widely and empathize readily. They are secularizing, ac-
quiring a common concern with problems identified as socio-
economic rather than religious. They are becoming activist: prob-
lems are to be dealt with by policy rather than by prayer. On all
manner of public questions, they have opinions, individually ar-
ticulated and positively expressed. As their numbers increase they
are bound to play a larger role in the future direction of Turkish
society. What remains to be worked out is the shape of their po-
litical future.

The 1950 election, which turned out of office the Atatiirk party
that had governed continuously over the quarter-century since the
Revolution, gave an important impetus to mass participation in
political life. Professor L. V. Thomas has written of this event;

No feature of the nationwide political agitation was more remark-
able to the "Old Turkey Hand" than the total disappearance of hesitancy
or fear on the part of the common people as they discussed their gov-
ernment. 11

In the spring of 1954 I accompanied Ismet Inonti and Kasim
Giilek on a pre-election campaign trip to the Adana region. What
had struck the Old Turkey Hands in 1950 was even more highly
visible in 1954. In remote villages the peasants still rushed forward
to kiss the hands of the candidates. But these were no longer

( 166 ) The New Turks

simply "our masters.” When the serious business of the election
issues was put on the table, the men who spoke up, the local
Transitionals, asked questions that were direct, tough, and in-
sistent. The issues were not moral but economic, and of a crescendo
pattern— the market price of crops, the amount of government sup-
port, the availability of consumer goods, the proposed legislation
to give American companies prospecting rights on Turkish oil.
These are not the questions of a quiescent peasantry, but of an
alert electorate.

These elections have thus opened an avenue of mass political
participation. In what measure this avenue will be broadened to
encourage popular participation in shaping the national and inter-
national life of Turkey remains to be determined by future events.
If the measure is large, as seems likely, then the next great accre-
tion of public influence will go to those persons we cafl Transi-
tionals. They are not now rich, informed, or powerful. But they
exhibit the desire to become all of these things. As the Grocer of
Balgat put it: “My eye is at the higher places.” The further element
is that the modernized elite of Turkey is well-attuned to the rising
and spreading aspirations of the Transitionals. This goes far to
explain Turkey’s political stability in a Middle East elsewhere
riven by conflicts within elites, between elites and aspirants.

As we turn from Turkey to the highly unstable Arab lands, we
shall be obliged to deal with the passing of traditional society as
partly the story of modernization manque by reason of ideological
schism and political cleavage. We make the transition by way of
Lebanon— the Arab country which began its modernization earliest
and, partly for that reason, has developed it farthest.

The Arab Worlds

VI.

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass

"To be a Levantine is to live in two worlds or more
at once, without belonging to either,”

• — ArnERT Hourani

LEBANON is the most modem Arab land today as an
outcome of its Instory. Smaller than Connecticut, with little over
a million inhabitants, Lebanon is no leader in natural power and
wealth. Industrially, it has nothing that measures up to the Turkish
steel complex of Karabiik; its farming, based on intensive cultiva-
tion of small stony plots, is negligible compared to Egypt’s highly
organized agricultural system. Yet it scores well ahead of all Arab
neighbors on every index of modernity. Lebanon has the highest
proportion of people who live in cities; earn and spend cash; attend
school and axe literate; read newspapers, see films and hear radios. 1
To explain this requires an historical resum 6.

The Lebanese early became attuned to a variety of mod-
ernizing influences from abroad— trade connections, Christian ties
to European churches and to emigrant colonies overseas, wide-
spread contact with Western missionaries and administrators. These
religious, economic and cultural factors transformed village life
while other Arab peasantries slumbered. Many issues raised by
modernization remain unresolved, but Lebanon has moved far-
thest away from Arab-Muslim traditionalism. In its place there
developed a modem set of specifically Lebanese perspectives and
practices. Their distinctive mark is to interweave modernism
more closely with Westernism than is permissible in any currently
prevailing ideology in the Middle East. As the historical conditions
under which this occurred are still operative in Lebanon, and
clarify some of her current problems, we do well to begin by re-
viewing these Westernizing factors.

( JC9 )

( 170 )

The Arab Worlds

1. The Westernizing Factors

Lebanon has always been an entrepdt, a way-station for for-
eigners with exotic goods and ideas. Its ports convened people
from East and West in Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and
Ottoman times. Among its merchants have flourished qualities of
enterprise and adaptability not associated with agricultural so-
cieties. Commercial exchange has been augmented by recent de-
velopment as a regional center of education and recreation. Students
flock to the American University of Beirut and the University de
St. Joseph, vacationers to the cool mountain resorts which provide
a major source of the national income. Increasingly, international
conferences and organizations make their headquarters in Beirut.
The national airport is a way-station for world airlines.

A distinctly Western political phase began, after the 18(50
massacre of Christians by Druzes, when the Great Powers estab-
lished an autonomous regime headed by a Christian mtitasarrlf
(governor). Subsequently, Lebanon’s ‘public security and stand-
ards of social and political life advanced to a point not nearly
reached by any other province of the Ottoman Empire.” 2 There-
after the old saying became current: “Happy is he who possesses
even a goat’s enclosure in the Lebanon.” 3 Independence symbol-
ized its uniqueness by affiliation with Phoenician ancesby. Even
Westernized Christians, such as the young poet Said ‘Aql, still
cherish tin’s Phoenician link with the Mediterranean rather than
the Arab-Muslim world. 4

The lifeways of Lebanese separateness deepened as a large
Christian population settled on the Mountain. Christian increase
was due to another important Lebanese tradition, that of asylum
for persecuted religious and racial groups, which also goes back
very far (to Byzantine and early Arab times). Christianity and
Westernization grew together. Channels of communication with
the West were ready-made for members of the Uniatc, Orthodox
and Protestant sects. They, in turn, relayed Western influence in-
ternally. Leading Westemizers were the Maronite Christians (to-
day about 30 per cent of the population), for their ties with Rome
and France provided their safety in a Muslim area. The first Arab
press was probably introduced by a Maronite scholar educated in
Rome early in the I7th century. 5 The first modem school was

Lebanon: Ttco Worlds in Small Compass ( 171 )

founded in 1789 by a Maronite patriarch educated at an Italian
seminary', 8

Since the Ottoman millet system encouraged local communities
to co-exist with minimum interaction, these Christian channels to
the West operated mainly as closed circuits. As a result, inde-
pendent rates of social change occurred within the Lebanese area,
the Christians modernizing faster than others. But, in time, dif-
fusion occurred. An instance was the Arabic literary renaissance.
The flow of influence in this case illustrates the role of communica-
tion in social change. Since the Lebanese Christians controlled the
channels of enlightenment (schools, presses, foreign contacts),
Muslims seeking new ways throughout the area tended to move
toward them. The newspapers and magazines initiated by Lebanese
Christians in Cairo in the 1870’s brought Muslim Egyptians into
the Arabic cultural revival. 7

European and American missionaries, by founding schools and
presses, performed a modernizing function analogous to that of
Western military instructors in the Ottoman officers’ academies.
Religious and military education were their respective aims, but
a regular side-efFect was the transmission of Western languages,
ideas and personal ties to small but influential groups. Since the
missionaries developed the only school system ranging from ele-
mentary' to university level, Christians early outdistanced Muslims
in literacy and learning. As late as 1941-43, Christians still con-
stituted 70 per cent of the school population but only 53 per cent
of the total population; and among Christians enrollment was
15.8 per cent compared to the Muslim 7.8 per cent 8 Today almost
70 per cent of tire total population is literate, with nearly universal
literacy in the original Mount Lebanon area. There is no remotely
comparable literacy' rate in any other Arab land.

Whereas Christianity brought modem enlightenment, the politi-
cal modernization of Lebanon is largely a French legacy. France
entered the Middle East as protector of the Cross, by leading the
Crusades; later Suleyman die Magnificent recognized Francis I as
protector of all Christians of the Latin rite in Ottoman possessions.
French predominance in die Levant is recorded in the Arabic
language, where Franji (Frank) and foreigner are coterminous.
Odier Western powers were influential. Americans and Britons,
active in education and commerce, made a strong impress. Some
Lebanese adopted walking exercises, afternoon teas, and punctual-

( 172 ) The Arab Worlds

ity to the extent that they became known as the “Ingliz” to others. 8
The French, however, made the more massive quest for cultural
pre-eminence and political power.

France created the separate state of Greater Lebanon, incor-
porating predominantly Muslim districts under a prevailing Chris-
tian element. There the French laid the basis for Lebanese mod-
ernization, Public order was firmly established, a modem code of
contracts replaced the Ottoman Majalla , and a new legislative
code was enacted. 10 French capital built ports, roads, railways
and public utilities, and helped to develop the silk and cement
industries. 11 The Constitution of 1926 made Lebanon the first Arab
Republic and established a framework for representative govern-
ment But effective power was denied to indigenous leaders, and
little was done to diffuse the political mentality that sustains a
democracy. Instead, divisiveness and sectarianism were permitted
(and sometimes fostered) to improve the French position. On bal-
ance, however, the mandatory regime was a net instrument of
modernization— by what it accomplished directly and by the regular
contact with a European social system which it provided.

Indigenous needs, the missionary movement, French governance
—all played their part in developing a more cosmopolitan variety
of person in Lebanon, Modernization was further accelerated by
the profound changes which altered Lebanese village life long be-
fore they became visible in other Middle Eastern lands. Nothing
similar occurred in the Turkish village, for example, until after
World War II, with Marshall Aid tractors and roads. Their earlier
modernization and higher living standards explain why Lebanese
Traditionals are less traditional than villagers elsewhere in the area.

The Lebanese early acquired mobility. Large-scale movement
of people— both urbanization and emigration— began in the late
19th century, when population growth and land congestion re-
sulted in excessive fragmentation of holdings. 12 Peasants faced the
classic choice of destitution or migration. 13 The special feature
of Lebanese history is the high proportion of those who chose to
move. An unfavorable ratio of population to land has not been
sufficient to mobilize large numbers in other Middle Eastern areas.
The ratio is much more unfavorable in Egypt, yet the fellah does
not migrate. Nor does the Anatolian villager leave Turkey. In con-
trast, there are probably as many Lebanese living outside the
homeland as there are in Lebanon. 14

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Smell Compass ( 173 )

Educated Lebanese also migrated. Highly trained and seeking
better opportunities, thousands went to Egypt under the British
regime as subordinate officials, merchants and professionals. The
largest numbers made their way to Latin America and the United
States. 16 In Brazil, emigre Lebanese came to own 500 large in-
dustrial enterprises, including some of the largest textile plants
in the world. 10 Emigration deepened with the permanent transfer
of whole families, becoming a social force which touched all levels
of the community.

Geographic mobility, historic antecedent of mass media in this
role, was the key to social and psychic mobility. We associate this
with our survey results which show that the Lebanese are today
more facile empathizers than other Middle Eastern peoples. In
Tabic 9, for example, under 2 per cent of Lebanese respondents
could not choose another country if they had to leave Lebanon
(as compared with huge resistance to this question elsewhere).
The presence of relatives and countrymen overseas reduces the
agony of forsaking familiar earth. As one farmer said, "It is easier
to go to America because there are many Arabs there. I know
people who have gone there.” This personal link can create psychic
familiarity and even the illusion of physical nearness. A pro-
Communist laborer, who nonetheless would go to the United States
rather than the Soviet Union if he had to leave Lebanon, justified
his choice by saying: "America is nearer. Russia is very far and
very wide. . . . We have no relatives with Russia, it is very far
away.” Large-scale emigration over past generations has shaped
personal identification with the outer world among those who
remained behind.

Concomitant with emigration was urbanization: villagers, while
supplying a steady flow overseas, also built up the Lebanese cities.
Today, almost a fifth of the population resides in Beirut; another
fifth in Tripoli, Saida and Zahle. Between 1932 and 1951 the pro-
portion of population in cities over 10,000 rose about 8 per cent
(an absolute increase of 220, 000). 17 Since there were not enough
urban jobs to absorb this increase, many farmers did not quit their
villages but took part-time work in nearby cities. The practice of
temporary residence outside the village, rare before 1880, gradually
became commonplace as Lebanon developed roads and acquired
automobiles. 18 Many young farmers experienced part-time living
away from their village as a work-routine. 19

( 174 ) The Arab Worlds

This high mobility had profound repercussions for villagers
who moved and for those who remained behind. As remittances
from relatives in cities or overseas dwarfed other sources of income,
villagers acquired a new and lively sense of cash, which developed
further with the increased use of mountain villages as summer
resorts. Lebanese villagers acquired a taste for risk-taking, virtually
unknown to the Syrian peasant who hoards his money or converts
it into jewelry. With cash as die new gauge of value, land lost its
sanctified status and became an item in the calculus of market
price. 20 The alterations which mobility and monetization have long
been working in the psychic equipment of the ordinary villager
explain why there are relatively more Transitionals in rural Lebanon
than in other Arab countries.

A more exact statement is that Transitionals in Lebanon are,
by and large, far less traditional than their peers elsewhere in the
Middle East. The modernizing process has carried so many Leban-
ese so much further into the 20th century that they face more
modem problems in more modem ways than do their opposite
numbers elsewhere. It is among Transitionals in rural Lebanon,
for example, that the roles of youth and women are posed in terms
parallel to Western discussion of these matters. In rural Egypt
and Iran, these matters are not even salient yet as problems. Aware-
ness that these role-conflicts are central issues for Lebanese Tran-
sitionals today is an outcome of our case study. But we wish to
approach them, having reviewed the impact of communication
upon Lebanese modernization in the past, by way of the commu-
nication data produced by the 1950 survey.

2. Media *and Status

We first classified our Lebanese respondents by the media
index used in Turkey.* This adequately differentiated the Tradi-
tionals— of whom 60 per cent were non-listeners to radio, com-
pared with 6 per cent among all the others. But since the

“The Lebanese sample was designed to overrepresent the literate poP u "
lation living in areas where the mass media exert their greatest influence. Two
urban residents were interviewed for every rural resident, three men tor
every woman, and the sample divided about equally between respondents in
high, medium and low income brackets. Geographical concentration in the
Tripoli, Saida and Beirut-Mount Lebanon districts was designed to assure ade-
quate coverage of these three major regions, so different in historical and
sectarian tradition.

Lebanon’. Ttco Worlds in Small Compass ( 175 )

Transitionals are so much further advanced in Lebanon than
elsewhere, we needed a more refined measure to differentiate
them significantly from the Modems. The sub-classification in
Table 1, separating those who listen only to domestic stations from
those who listen also to foreign stations, filled this need.

Table 1 — Types of Listening

Modtrnt

TrantWonols

Traditional!

Totah

Foreign U»tener«

67 %

33%

9%

116

Domestic litleners

27

<51

31

86

Non-listeners

6

6

<50

102

N — 304

The correspondence between lesser modernity and narrower
listening scope is very close, but several questions remained— e.g.,
what are the important differences between domestic and foreign
listeners? In Lebanon, the foreign h'stener hears not only foreign
news and views, but also lectures on Arab history, favorite Arab
songs, and superb Koran readings. One listener explained his
fondness for BBC programs by saying:

They fit into our life here in the Near East more than others. I like
to listen to London because it has various programs about religion, cul-
ture and history' of the Middle East. It is something concerned with us.

Conversely, the domestic listener may find an Engh'sh or French
language program in progress. In 1949, three of Radio Lebanon’s
news broadcasts were beamed in French, two in English and four
in Arabic. Besides nine hours a day of Arabic broadcasting, there
were two and one-half hours of French and one hour of English
programs. French broadcasts were produced by the Ecole Sup6-
ricure des Lettres (with a subsidy from the French Legation) and
English programs were prepared by the staff of the British lega-
tion. 21 Given these facts, it was doubtful a priori that domestic
listeners would differ significantly from foreign listeners. But quite
different they turn out, in fact, to be.

The biographical data drawn from the interviews showed that
each “radio audience’’ corresponds closely to a "social class.” Table
2 presents the differences on education, literacy and standard of
firing. The three types of radio audiences differ consistently in
socioeconomic class and, as further analysis showed, on an array
of attributes involving status, behavior and outlook. On frequency

( 176 ) The Arab Worlds

of media exposure, on media preference and program preference
there are wide and recurrent differences.

Table 2 — Socioeconomic Status of Listener Types

Foreign

Domestic

Non-Ustencit

High education (Iyc6e or college}

87%

34%

13%

Literate

95

71

50

Above average living standard

87

70

39

N*={116)

(86)

(102)

* These numbers apply for all fables unless otherwise stated.

Media exposure, we have noted, is centripetal. Radio-listeners
tend to be reached by other media than non-listeners. As Table 3
shows, foreign listeners are more media-minded than all others.

Table 3 — Exposure to Newspapers and Films

Foreign

Domestic

Non-

Listeners

Listeners

listeners

See movies

85%

71%

37%

Read newspapers

90

72

46

It is a rare foreign listener who does not also read newspapers
and attend movies. Domestic listeners take a high intermediate
position, while non-listeners show a dramatic decline in exposure.
Foreign listeners are also most regularly exposed to all media
as shown in Table 4.

Table 4 — Frequency of Exposure

Foreign

Domestic

Non*

Listeners

Listeners

listeners

See movies weekly

63%

41%

42%

Read newspapers daily

68

61

44

Hear radio daily

90

67

The foreign listener is a heavy consumer of communications.
One such young respondent (096) of Greek Orthodox faith, fluent
in English, French and Arabic, sees movies three to four times a
week. He reads regularly two newspapers, one published in Syria,
the other in France. His content preferences are numerous and
varied; he “usually reads” eleven parts of his newspapers, ranging
from foreign news to novels and stories. Among the radio stations
“best heard here” or “heard in the past month,” he named BBC,

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Smell Compass ( 177 )

VOA, Damascus, Egypt, Beirut, Ankara and Belgrade. He also
reads, at least occasionally, the Egyptian Mail, Life, Time, True
Story and Romance magazines. This young man’s involvement with
movies and romance stories may be related to the fact that he was
going through a courtship. He, like other young respondents, told
the interviewer that he valued tire media as a teacher of appropriate
conduct in life.

At tire other end of the spectrum are the non-listeners. An il-
literate peasant woman— who had never attended the cinema, had
no contact with the other media, and had never heard of Europe—
speaks for extreme rural isolation. Her information comes, as in
Biblical times, from the primary network of the woman’s daily
round. Asked how she got her news, she replied:

From the neighbors; at the baker}' when I go to bake the bread, and
at the well where I get our drinking water. (Who tells you the news
when you’re at those two places?) All the women who go there. (What
do they usually talk about?) About who is going to marry, who is going
to have a baby, who went to Tripoli, and what for, who quarreled with
whom and why. (18o)

When news is equated to village gossip, face-to-face exchange suf-
fices. Tin's old woman e.xplained that she did not miss reading news-
papers because: "It’s not for us, it’s only for the men— they know
how to read and they are more capable of thinking than we are.”
Nor did she miss the movies, explaining why by an item of Tradi-
tional wisdom: "When one has not been aware of the existence of a
tiling, one does not miss it."

Most Lebanese Tradifa'onals do not exhibit this complete iso-
lation from tiie mass media. Deprived as many of them are, they
have been touched to the extent that desires, if not behavior, are
modified. A destitute shepherd aged 26, unlike the village wife,
docs miss things of which he has become dimly aware. "While he
is not exposed to any of the media, devotes his leisure time exclu-
sively to cleaning his nails, and invokes Allah to answer most of
the interview questions, nevertheless this shepherd envies those
who listen to the radio: “They are educated and understand.” Even
more docs he covet the skills of the newspaper reader: “One learns
about the world and happenings in Beirut while sitting in his
home. . . . Papers tell many tilings. . . His feeling is made more
poignant by its very vagueness— he does not know exactly what it
is he is missing. When asked by the interviewer what the papers

( 178 ) The Arab Worlds

write about, he answers: “Many things, I cannot say, because I
don’t know, but I hear so.” (£86)

Selective perception enables Traditionals, exposed to the media
in limited dosage, to notice only those messages which confirm their
customs and values. The Balgat Chief found in movies mainly cher-
ished resonances of traditional martial themes. Similarly, a poor
Lebanese woman aged 35, of Greek Orthodox faith, does not dis-
cover in movies the enticements of freedom and fashion. Instead
she learns “reliance on God.” Radio helps her to withdraw into
her preferred dysphoric fantasies. When she tunes in Arabic music,
“I remember my relatives who died— and what a sad life this is."
Novel and distant matters do not penetrate her frame of attention.
She cannot bear to watch dancing other than the traditional
dabki, 22 and she refuses to hear news of foreign countries: “I
don’t understand them and I don’t bother.” (031) A constrictive
personality shuts out the potentially expansive effects of the media
to which she is exposed.

But the modem media do enable others to create new identifi-
cations and thus to participate in the modernizing process. An
index is program preference— what people look for and listen for
in the media. Attitudes toward news are of central relevance here.
It was naturally among Traditionals that dislike for news was
most often manifested. One villager warned: "Those who listen
buy trouble for themselves. Because they worry themselves about
what is not their concern. They must stick to their work. It makes
them live, not wars in China.” (012)

Conversely, preoccupation with the news characterizes the
Modem respondent. A retired Army major anticipates his daily
diet of information with the same pleasure as his victuals: Just
as I wait for 12 o’clock to have lunch,” he says, "so do I wait for
8 o’clock to hear the news.” (024) The data show that 80 per
cent of the Modems are interested in news broadcasts, as com-
pared to 40 per cent Transitionals and 30 per cent Traditionals.
Also, 62 per cent foreign listeners, as compared to 55 per cent
domestic listeners, chose news as a favorite program. The foreign
listeners showed greater involvement; 53 per cent tuned in news
broadcasts daily, as compared to 28 per cent domestic listeners
who did so.

Among those interested in news, the foreign listeners were dis-
tinctly more concerned with international issues . Respondents

Lebanon: Two Worlds In Small Compass ( 179 )

were asked to recall the news they had heard most recently— a
useful indicator of attention and retention. They divided thus:

Table 5 — Type of News Heard Most Recently

Foreign Domestic Non*

listeners listeners Listeners

Inlernotionol newt

71%

44%

34%

Nalionot newt

22

30

32

toco) or community newt

4

18

32

Family newt

0

8

13

Other

3

29%

0

56%

2

66%

Total

100%

100%

100%

N =

(95)

(63)

(63)

Tin's answered our a priori query whether people are foreign
listeners because they care more about events outside Lebanon.
As Modems, their interests in fact encompass the world. While the
other audiences also recalled international news items, their major
concern was the domestic scene— family, local and community
news. These were mentioned by foreign listeners hardly at all
(4 per cent).

Closely related to news preference is media preference. The
relevant differences are shown in Table 6, on the question ask-
ing how respondents got their most recent news.

Table 6 — Source of Mosf Recent News

Foreign

Domestic

Non-

listeners

Listeners

Listeners

Radio

51%

25%

4%

Newspaper

31

45

38

Word ot mouth

18

30

58

Total

100%

100%

100%

N —

(109)

(73)

(79)

While non-listeners rely most heavily on oral communication,
and domestic listeners turn largely to newspapers, a majority of
foreign listeners depend on radio (especially international broad-
casts) for the type of news that most concerns them.

Striking among the Modems are the warm sentiments they
express about radio. Americans of this type— the socioeconomic

( 180 ) The Arab Worlds

elite, cosmopolitan in outlook, heavy consumers of communication
—are much less radio-minded. They turn rather to the printed media
of books, newspapers, magazines. 28 When Lebanese respondents
were asked to choose between radio and newspapers, the majority
of Moderns chose the radio. This reaction stemmed not only from
their low esteem of the Lebanese press, but also from their high
regard for foreign radio. One Modem described his radio as an
“electric newspaper, which keeps me in contact with the rest of
the world.” (024) Another, a well-traveled engineer fluent in four
languages, called the radio “a splendid invention giving me . . .
the feeling of not being isolated from the outside world.” (025)
Many said that they “could not get along without” a radio of their
own (a more frequent sentiment, in America, among housemaids
and other non-elite persons). And, indeed, 87 per cent Modems
as compared to 78 per cent Transitionals and 16 per cent Tradi-
tionals owned their own sets.

The foreign listeners intense interest in international news
suggests an expansive outlook. This is documented in Table 7,
which reports on an index of cosmopolitanism, made up of items
that reveal interest and exposure to various sorts of international
experience.

Table 7— Indicators of

Speak some English
Recent contact with foreigners
Read foreign publications
Prefer U.S. films
Prefer Western music
Know United Nations

N =

Cosmopolitan Interests

Foreign

Domestic

Non-

listeners

listeners

Listeners

71 %

4D%

7%

70

55

28

68

10

4

84

63

47

56

19

—

78

50

24

(116)

(82)

(102)

The foreign listener is a Westernized man. Not only does he
speak a foreign language, hut he meets people from abroad an
exposes himself to every form of mediated contact with the West
A remarkable proportion reads foreign publications, The Lebanese
is much more likely than the Turk or Egyptian to be exposed
to Western communications, as indicated in Table 8 by circula-
tion figures for sample issues in 1953-54.

Empathy is the base of the Modem’s interest in the wider world.

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 181 )

A young Lebanese girl, educated in a French school in Beirut,
was able to identify with the far-away American soldiers to the
extent that news from Korea made her feel “miserable ... be-
cause American boys are losing their lives for no worthy reason . . .”
(401) Another girl, a well-to-do Sunni studying at the American
University, revealed an even more striking ability to identify her-
self with an American situation. Her most recent news was "the
enormous bill Mr. Truman is presenting to Congress of nearly
90 milliard dollars” (How did you feel?) “I was shocked, plain
shocked. I believe America is driving head-first into a crazy scheme
of tilings which is going to destroy it. It’s spending much more
than its capital, financially and in human life and endurance.” This
student, it turns out, is a great fan of American popular music.
She listens constantly to radio broadcasts of “American blues,
waltzes, tangos and rhumbas.” Conversely, she avoids Arabic music
like tiie plague: “The music is horrid, the voices and instruments
are intolerable, and each song takes a quarter of an hour to
finish.” Her reading fare also is almost entirely American— Time,
Life, Ladies Home Journal, fasluon and screen magazines— because
“they are much more entertaining.” Tins students continuous medi-
ated exposure to American life brings Washington's concerns
closer to her than those of Beirut. She exhibits an extreme syndrome
of cosmopolitanism— xenophilic incorporation of the foreign as a
mode of uniformly rejecting most native secondary symbols.

Table 8 — Comparative Sales of American Magazines

T/m.

lih

Fortunt

Combined Artrag •
$a/ei per

10,000 inhabitants

lebanon

1,226

652

355

26

17J5

Turley

1.239

1,373

541

28

1.4

t9ypt

1.452

1,779

407

56

\7

Pro-Westcm Modems have no comer on the foreign news
market. Also heavily involved are Modems hostile to Western
policy, who combine ideological antipathy (the antonym of sym-
pathy not of empathy) with a desire to hear Western broadcasts.
As educated people they consider it necessary to know what is
occurring in the world from the best available sources. An Anglo-
phobe physician (who says the British “would gladly enslave all
other nations for their own egotistical purposes of comfort and

( 182 ) The Arab Worlds

wealth”) is nevertheless a BBC listener— because “they give the
most accurate, precise and up-to-date news as compared to other
countries. I have been listening to news from England for over
15 years and have never had to doubt their truthfulness . . "
He prefers international radio because the local Beirut papers
feature “the most stupid news about trivial thefts, or the length
of someone’s moustache.” (038)

A 29-year-old senior accountant at the Iraq Petroleum Com-
pany, who spends “approximately all” his leisure time in political
party and trade union activities, also feels this need to see die
big picture. Like the doctor, he has no particular fondness for
the West, and is convinced that they broadcast to Lebanon in
order to serve their own ends. But he explains, “I listen to foreign
programs not because I like to, but because I want to understand
the policy of that country towards world affairs and towards us
here. ... I want to compare its news with what I read in the
Arabic press.” (142) This sophisticated awareness of news as
conditioned by source— the need to know who is saying what for
what purpose— is typically an attribute of the Modem foreign
listeners.

The Traditional, by contrast, does not treat “the news” as a
complex autonomous reality to be apprehended only by a varied
diet of information and opinion. He has a more “itemistic” ap-
proach. Unlike the doctor, he often is interested in local scandal
and personal anecdote— the length of somebody’s moustache. Out-
side” news, when mentioned at all, related to Syria or other Arab
lands. Typical recalled items were: the opening of a road between
Syria, and Lebanon; the death of an important man in his bath-
room, allegedly the victim of poisoning; the formation of a new
cabinet in Syria; the new association of Palestinian refugees de-
signed to regain their homes and properties; the capture of a thief
who hypnotizes people and then steals from them. In short, the
major news items that were remembered dealt with national or
local events, and often enough with gossip and scandals.

Among domestic listeners who occasionally dialed world news,
there was a tendency to recall items with a special personal refer-
ence, A fisherman judges America unfavorably because he once
heard that “the Americans do not allow people to catch fish on
their shores.” As for Russia, he says: “I will not live in Russia
because they do not have a sea. I will choose Morocco. Because

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 183 )

it is a sen country and they say it has lots of fish on its coast I
can fish as much as I like and become rich. (What will you do
then?) I will buy a big motor boat and fish more.” He feels that
he understands the British: “They are fishermen” (107)

Aside from their concepts of news, the Lebanese differ on other
indicators of modernity. Enlightening is the hypothetical choice of
country if one had to leave Lebanon. Sorted according to educa-
tional level of respondents, the choices are shown in Table 9.

Table 9 — Choice of Country by Educational Level

USA

lalin

Amtrlca

Europe

SoWtf

Bloc

Arab

Ar»a

Iftbanon

Only

Totofi

High education

49%

o%

25%

2%

8%

2%

(115)

low education

49

10

7

4

18

1

(85)

There is a striking absence of persons (so prevalent elsewhere)
who refuse to consider any move at all. Among those choosing the
U. S., where there was no difference in frequency, there was great
difference between the two groups in rationale of choice. The
low-educated, in true Traditional style, chose the move that in-
volved the least mobility- They justified their choice by saying
there are large Lebanese colonies there; in imagination the U. S.
becomes a displaced Lebanon. A cart driver said: “I know people
who have gone there.” A chauffeur added: “I have a cousin who
went there and became rich. ... I hope I can go there.” Said
a third: “There are Arabs there. I have some relatives there. In
Russia I don’t know anybody.” (052) Few Traditionals could
conceive of moving to Western Europe, where there are no sub-
stantial Lebanese colonies to provide the personal link. Those
who did not choose the Americas tended to choose other Arab
countries— again, the move involving the least mobility. By con-
trast, one of every four Modems chose a West European country.
Their ready capacity to “see” themselves in a non-Lebanese and
non-Arab environment is a measure of their Westernization. Not
the primary circle of personal relations, but the secondary symbol-
ism of psychocultural values, guided their choice.

Another indicator of high empathy is the widespread acceptance
of Western music among the Modems: 56 per cent foreign listeners,
as compared to 19 per cent domestic listeners, said that Western
music was their preferred radio fare. Taste in music— “the religion

( 184 ) The Arab Worlds

of emotions”— often reflects deep affective preferences. A domestic
listener declared: "Arabic music and songs . . . make me happy
and express what goes on in my heart.” ( 060) "I don’t like for-
eign music,” said another. “I think that Arabic music is more fitting
for us. It is always soft and dreaming music while foreign music
is not what I like.” (064) A foreign listener lines up at the oppo-
site pole: “Arab music . . . has no rhythm, no harmony, and noth-
ing at all and the drum is always making the other sound. I hate
it.” (100) Many foreign listeners criticized Radio Beirut’s broad-
casts of Western music from its record library as ‘limited” and
"of second quality.” One foreign listener described Lebanese who
preferred foreign music as “those who mixed more and had more
chance to acquire European tastes.”

In their devotion to Western music Lebanese Modems outdid
their opposite numbers in all other countries, where there was
much resistance to Western music and an overruling preference for
the familiar arrangements of sound. Religious affiliation is asso-
ciated with this profound taste-shift in Lebanon even more closely
than education. Among Lebanese with less than a high school
education, over 25 per cent Christians compared with 2 per cent
Muslims preferred Western music. And Muslims of high education
preferred Western music less often than did similarly educated
Christians. Domestic listeners prefer Lebanese folk music, Egyptian
popular songs and Arabic folksongs of all types. It is less demand-
ing for the little-educated to hear songs in the familiar colloquial
language of speech— for them a welcome relief from the classical
literary Arabic used in news broadcasts, simplified though it is.

We have just traversed a varied terrain of media behavior,
drawing attention mainly to tire large and consistent differences
between several types of media audience. Recall that these audiences
corresponded to our basic typology of modernization (Table 1)
and to a hierarchy of social classes (Table 2). We used the audience
types because, in Lebanon, the Transitionals are so close to the
Modems on cruder indices. This is itself an important finding.
While the Transitionals are not nearly so well-educated as the
Modems, they are highly literate (71%) and highly exposed ana
highly empathic. These attributes combine with their extreme mo-
bility to give Lebanese Transitionals an especially influential role
in the further spread of modem ways. Particularly the youthful
Transitionals shuttling between city and village, as we have seen.

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 185 )

acquire through their direct and mediated experience of the outside
world a degree of influence in rural Lebanon that is unparalleled
elsewhere in the Middle East. Indeed, these mobile young Transi-
tionals are in process of taking over “opinion leadership” from the
traditional rural elite. The 1950 survey provided some data which
clarify Hie inner mechanics of this process.

3. New Opinion Leaders in Rural Lebanon*

The tone of village life in Lebanon is being altered by new
sources of information and ideas. In the rural communication net-
work, human sources are more important than the media. Villagers
get their news, spread it, and interpret it largely by personal
means. The historic role of “relay” between isolated village and
the wide world was played usually by strangers and often by
foreigners. Such people are still important, but as the old isola-
tion yields to rising town-village traffic, the newly-mobile indigenous
young men increasingly serve as intermediaries. As they bring in
news, so they shape opinion and command respect formerly ac-
corded only the village elders. To gain perspective on this com-
munication revolution, now in progress, we first note the traditional
pattern.

The traditional molders of rural opinion were undisputed so
long as tire village was a self-contained entity, entering into only
occasional and irregular contacts with the outside world. Then the
individual’s widest loyalty was toward the village, especially when
it was threatened by such external enemies as rival villages or
marauding nomads. In normal times, narrower symbols of loyalty
prevailed— family, kin group, the village faction to which one’s
kin were allied. Relief from economic distress and support in
family feuds depended upon the landed patriarchs who headed
these village institutions. Additionally, the strong sectarian loyal-
ties of the rural peasantry assured deference and influence to the
shaykh, priest or Imam.

Among the Lebanese non-listeners there were 28 illiterate
peasants whose interviews were closely analyzed for clues to the
changing networks of newsgetting and opinion-forming in the vil-
lage. In their responses there were few references to traditional

‘Sections 2 and 3 are based on BASR report “The Radio Audience of
Lebanon" by \Y. N. McPhce and R. B. Meyersohn.

( 186 ) The Arab Worlds

community leaders, and those few references seemed formalistic.
One illiterate village blacksmith, when asked if anyone had recently
approached him for advice, was startled. “Would any person come
to me, a blacksmith, for advice?” he asked. “No, he would go to
the Mukhtar or the Priest. I can’t advise him. They can.” (121) But
asked if he had himself gone to them for advice recently, he an-
swered, “No.” Only one villager ascribed to his Mukhtar a hey
"relay” position, much in the style of his Balgat counterpart:

[The Mukhtar) holds the guest house open for the villagers. ... It
sometimes happens that we go to the Mukhtar and someone reads the
newspaper loudly. . . . We always hear discussions in gatherings at the
Mukhtar’s. . . . He is a good man and respected and knows how to
read. (066)

The other 27 respondents did not mention the traditional opinion-
leaders in speaking of the village hierarchy of communication.

Traditional influence in the oral communication network de-
rived from position in the social pyramid. Age in itself confened
high status and was assumed to impart wisdom. Some of the older
respondents assume that this relationship still holds. “Time has
made me an old man,” said a village merchant, “and I know much
about everything.” (012) “[People always consult me] because I
have had long experience,” explained another. (201) Some young
villagers also confirmed the continuing importance of the elders.
One said he asked advice from his father who “is old and knows
much.” (017) Another said he sought advice on his quarrels with
other workers from the older people: “They are more experienced
in life and respected by all” (068)

But closer reading of the interviews shows that the influence
of the patriarchs declines as village isolation decreases. The old
people, it turns out, are consulted mainly on parish affairs— family
feuds, farming techniques, personalities, local ventures such as
buying land and choosing a wife. Their advice, still valued on such
matters, is not sought on problems of the outside world. For they
combine local expertise with an extensive range of ignorance. As
the Balgati turned from the Chief to the Grocer, a person outside
the Traditional hierarchy, when they wanted advice on Ankara,
so do the Lebanese villagers turn to the modernizing younger set
for instruction on the wider world.

The central fact about these young men is that contact with
the mass media builds their prestige and creates their role as

Lebanon : Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 187 )

opinion leaders. Mobility is at the core of the social changes which
elevated them. With growing urbanization and emigration, farm
boys no longer waited for their fathers to bequeath them land in
order to attain their allotted position in life. They became com-
muters, urbanites, or emigrants. Their independently acquired
wealth, when remitted home, led to a re-evaluation of roles. That
this transformation of basic personal relationships has been a pain-
ful process is documented by a tum-of-the-century letter found
by Afif Tannous in Bislimizzeen. In 1905, three emigre brothers
prospering in Australia mote their old father at home, to whom
they had been sending money, and begged him not to transfer
to tii cm the deference still due him as their father:

Two weeks ago, we have sent you a check for fifty pounds. . . . Our
dear father, we have to remark about the way you write to us, and that
it should not be so. Your letters contain many statements in which you
address us and praise us in such a way, as if we were the masters and
you the follower. There is no need for this at all, and our financial suc-
cess should not change the relationship between us. We are your sons
and shall always be obedient to you and do all we can to serve you.
. . . Write us as father and master, who orders his servants to do their
duty towards him. 24

The new rural elite gained influence only partly because it
commanded new wealth. Villagers also learned that traditional
authority figures could no longer advocate their interests as ef-
fectively as before. As individual gain, long ignored or depreciated
by tradition, 25 became a controlling behavioral goal, the power of
Idn loyalties and leaders declined. Ward politicians and union
leaders took the place of priests and kin leaders in the promotion
of new social demands. As formal contractual relationships in law
often superseded informal understandings known to all through
custom, lawyers and politicians replaced the village elders as
effective interpreters. Villagers sought guidance among the young
men who had access to tire political bosses in Beirut, acquaintance
with the ne\v legal and financial matters, or substantial funds. The
new counselors brought new ways of power w'ith them. As local
elections w'ere manipulated in the service of outside politicians, and
disputes on national ideology were injected into local feuds, the
impact of extra-village interests grew. One villager told his inter-
viewer how a group which met regularly to plot local strategy for
a national political party also operated as a source of news and

( 188 ) The Arab Worlds

opinion in the village. Another, an active member of the Phalange
Party, faithfully read its journal and discussed it among "my Party
colleagues with whom I meet almost every night at my village.”
(029) Union headquarters were mentioned in similar context.
For many villagers, the party or union clubroom has come to dis-
place the Mukhtar’s guest room as tire local communication hub,

The spread of rural education also helped to shape the new
elite. Learning is highly valued by the Lebanese. “It is surprising
how many sacrifices and privations Lebanese parents are willing
to undergo in order to send their children to secondary school.” 26
Young men, acquiring education, also gained stature from this
common deference for education. Even the Beduin in Lebanon
apparently does not share the contempt for learning commonly
found among his Jordanian counterparts. The one interviewed said:

Those who do not read and learn new things are like animals. If
that human being doesn’t know how to read and write how on earth
can he learn about the world? There are many thing to learn. (286)'

Many older villagers dismissed their own opinions as worthless
because of their lack of education. A 75-year-old farmer said,
“When you ask a person like me, I don’t know anything ... We
have many educated young men in the village who will answer
your questions very well.” (206) Said another older villager: Am
I learned [enough for you] to take my opinion about this? Go to
the person who goes to school and let him tell you. What do you
want my opinion for?” (162) How different was die situation
among young Anatolian villagers who, questioned on a matter of
importance would demur: “It is not for us to say, there are older
and wiser men who know these things.” In contrast, the educated
Lebanese youth do not hesitate to take over as their elders cede
leadership to them.

An important distinction must be made. Higher education often
makes such misfits of rural youngsters that they lose contact with
dieir village environment and exercise litde influence there. In
his 1939 study of Bishmizzeen, Afif Tannous noted that only 30

° Comment by Professor R. Patai: “In evaluating such statements one
must take into account the well-known tendency of the traditionally socialize
Arab to say what he assumes his questioner wants to hear ... in the
turn of conversation this exaggeration (‘like animals’) perhaps was regarded
by him as the right thing to say." (Personal letter.)

Lebanon: Ttoo Worlds in Small Compass ( 189 )

of the 212 villagers who had been educated above high school were
still living in the village, and all thirty of these were restive and
unsatisfied. 27 The 1950 interview's reveal that education still weans
some young Lebanese from their village culture. But nowadays,
these are more rarely the independent young men, more often the
dependent young women. A Shi'i girl, living with her wealthy
family in a southern village, said: ‘To come back from school in
Beirut and live in such a place where there is nobody to under-
stand me is very difficult.” The greatest problem for people like
her, she explained, was "to adapt ourselves with our ideas and
habits and opinions derived from our education to our life in
Ncbafa'eh with its strict and ignorant people.” (009)

The villagers who are "educated out” of the village do not
figure as molders of rural opinion. Their story belongs elsewhere.
Here we speak of those who do not receive "too much” educa-
tion. They leave elementary or technical school equipped to learn
about the larger world, but still remain in touch with their un-
educated elders. Continued access to the mass media— through
opportunities by their mobility and skills acquired by their school-
ing— provides the material for their influence. A young man re-
turning with news is likened to a lord distributing largesse by
his illiterate mother:

When my son comes from the city, he feels like a lord among the
neighbors because he reads the newspaper in the city, and he always
has many new things to tell the people in the village around. (056)

Youth’s contact with new kinds of experience impresses the
older villagers. "The young men . . . see a different world in this
cinema,” an older said. (308) Another felt that “die men who
read newspapers know everything. They sit and talk of things which
seem to us like a strange language .” (185) Tire youth now perform
the ancient function of the caravans, w'hich brought fabulous
stories of far-off lands to the village guest room. Said one villager:

Those who read newspapers . . . always have something of great
importance to tell. . . . We who do not read the newspapers wait for
others to amuse and fascinate us with what is happening in other villages
and towns. A friend of ours always tells us amazing and strange stories
. . . and he always says that he read this in the newspaper. (063)

The new' literates pass on more than bits of information. They
are especially valued as explainers of the new's, since their minds

( 190 ) The Arab Worlds

are considered more capable of coping with the “amazing and
strange” occurrences the media report. The villager quoted above
felt that newspaper readers:

. . . understand more than us and their mind is more capable than
ours in digesting very difficult news or material read. They understand
what the government is doing and what is happening in Damascus or
Tripoli. (063)

Many villagers need to have news explained after it is read. The
expository style of “things read” is not so readily comprehended
by illiterate individuals as the narrative style of “things told.” Sev-
eral villagers cannot grasp news from the mass media directly:

A shopkeeper here in the village was reading the paper and I stood ,
with them to hear . . . but I can’t understand much of what is said or
read. I prefer being told rather than listening to things read. (063)

Maybe [people who don’t listen to the radio] don’t understand it,
like me, I listened once to news [but] did not understand what the talk-
ing was because I am illiterate. (286)

I don’t want to listen to the radio. I don’t understand it. It’s talking
and singing. I listened but I didn’t understand. (288)

Some villagers cannot follow the simplified form of classical
Arabic used in broadcasts and newspapers. Others who could
“follow” the language were troubled by the analytic mode of
presentation, the unaccustomed categories of discourse, and the
impersonality of the mass media. These blocks render such mes-
sages unintelligible to persons raised in the oral tradition . 0 The vil-
lager needs a sympathetic personal intermediary to bridge the gap
between his traditional communications— colloquial narratives of
familiar content told by a visible narrator— and the heavy new
demands for empathy by media that report varied events far beyond
the range of village experience. The intermediary is likely to he
an educated young villager who knows the world of the mass
media but has retained enough contact with villagers to ‘ translate
the news into meaningful terms for them.

Many of the respondents identified the types of young villagers
who get around: students off at school, tractor operators who go

0 Professor Patai: “Literary Arabic sounds to the illiterate villager, and
even more so to the ears of Beduin, as a foreign tongue. I myself, years ago
heard a Beduin say in the lawcourt to the Arab judge who addressed him m
literary Arabic: ‘O master, don’t talk to me in French!’” (Personal letter.;

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 191 )

to the city for repairs, shopkeepers who visit Beirut at regular
intervals for supplies, truck and bus drivers who are routed from
cities through the countryside. 28 In addition to those whose busi-
ness keeps them on the move, there are numerous villagers who
"make it their business” to get into the city whenever they can.
The latter eagerly seek out the media on their jaunts to the city,
when they are most likely to see a movie, buy a newspaper, listen
to a cafe radio. For the mass media are concentrated in Lebanese
cities and the bulk of the population is obliged to seek access there.
Most of the 48 movie houses, for example, are urban. The 17
cinemas in Beirut provided about 54 per cent of national seating
capacity, and the 10 theaters in Tripoli accounted for another
17 per cent of available seats. The few cinemas in the provinces
operate only seasonally, so that a villager usually has to travel
to see a film. 20 Thus:

(Do you know what a cinema is?) Yes, I hear about it . . . from the
young people who go to Alcy and Beirut a lot. (What kind of people
are they?) They are drivers, sliopowners, and students. We, the old
people, have been rarely out of this village. (201)

A friend of mine goes to the movies much more often than I because
he has sons in school in Tripoli and he goes there often. He tells me
about them. (068)

There nre some policemen who go to Tripoli and see the movies and
they tell us what they see. (185)

Even newspapers do not automatically reach the village, which
depends upon its mobile element to read the papers in town and
transmit the news second-hand. Some bring the paper itself to
tlio local coffeehouse, where it can be read aloud to the assembled
males. The procedure is illustrated by an illiterate villager:

I heard the Jews were entering Lebanon here from the South so
I sent my son to buy the newspaper in Sydon. ... A teacher from Souk
al-Gharb (a large town) came to visit a farmer here. He had a news-
paper with him and read a story. All of us asked lu'm to read more. He
read everything in the paper. (Why is this not repeated more often?)
This man was not from our village and he very few times in a year
comes here. (What about other people in town?) The eldest of my
sons reads and writes . . . and other people read and write . . . but
they hardly ever buy a paper. It does not come to the town. It comes
only to subscribers and I don’t know any subscriber. (277)

Very few subscribe to newspapers or magazines anywhere in
Lebanon, including the cities where they are produced. About 80%

( 192 ) The Arab Worlds

of periodicals were published (as of 1949) in Beirut, the rest in
Tripoli, Saida and Zahle. But the post office distributed only about
5 per cent of total circulation, over 90 per cent of all copies being
delivered by hand. 30 If die rare subscriber is an obliging teacher
or eldest son living in the village, the villagers may have a fairly
regular reading of the paper at the local coffeehouse. But usually
they depend upon occasional trips of villagers to the city or on
urban visitors to die village.

As with the cinema and press, Beirut is the center for produc-
tion and consumption of radio programs. In 1948, 58 per cent of
the 31,000 registered radio receivers were in the capital city
wherein live but one-fifth of Lebanon’s population. The one family
of four or five that boasted its own set usually belonged to the
middle or upper urban classes. Most villagers were simply too poor
to own radios. An unskilled worker ( who earns considerably more
than the average peasant) would have to give up nearly two months’
earnings to purchase a set. 31 As a village shepherd said:

Townspeople do listen, but I don’t know them. Rich people have
radios [but] none around me have radios. (286)

The villager who does own a radio often is socially removed from
most of his neighbors. A poor village woman explained how this
barrier operated for her, as for the Balgat shepherd:

Many people have , . . [radios but] I don’t know these people. I
am poor and don’t go to people who don’t respect me and treat me well.
I mix with people like me, they have no radios. ... I do not listen
to the radio because we have no relations with those rich families. (063)

Most village listeners belong to “secondary audiences” which
don’t own their sets. Hence, except for the unemployed or under-
employed men who regularly frequent the coffeehouses to talk,
play tric-trac and lend one ear to Arabic music and news in the
background, listening tends to be haphazard and irregular. One
respondent first heard a radio “while passing in the streets of
Tripoli.” (286) Another went to Beirut, to the house where her
daughter worked, and was astonished at her introduction to the
radio: “I thought a man was standing behind it,” she avowed. (185)
Another was obliged to enter the hospital in a big city, and first
heard the radio “while awaiting admittance in the hotel/ (226)
Many still hear radio only while visiting the city for some special

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 193 )

purpose. Since media access is immeasurably easier in the city,
we can understand the succinct summary of the villager who ex-
plained: "People who go from place to place . . . take the lead
in telling us the news." (063) These, nowadays, are the mobile
young literates from the villages.

The older people forfeit influence not only because they lack
tire literacy and mobility of younger men. They also lack the psychic
expansiveness. Older villagers do not value empathy and regard
the constrictive self-system as a sign of good character. Thus tra-
ditional morality often cuts the older people off from contact with
Westernizing influences. They vehemently object to the young
people's exposure to the cinema, and sometimes even to radio.
Thus, in facing the large tensions which divide generations in any
transitional society, the elders of rural Lebanon are fighting a rear-
guard action against what has already happened. They ignore the
Koranic injunction that when “systems have passed away in the
land” those fare poorly who “deny the messengers.”

Two out of three older people expressed some disapproval of
movies. Sometimes the explanation was simply that the elders
felt awkward at the cinema, since it was the place where young-
sters met socially. (188, 206) More often they expressed rejection
of "new-fangled” ways by fear that old and accepted standards
were being undermined. A 69-year-old Greek Orthodox grocer spoke
for his generation in condemning the cinema: “It spoils our youth.
It develops in them all these feelings— gambling, drinking, they
also follow girls.” He was echoed by a pious 71-year-old grain
merchant who said: “Movies show films with naked girls . . . with
gambling. . . . They teach them how to kiss girls.” This respondent
begged the interviewer to "please convince my sons that die cinema
is bad.” (012) Films from abroad, which instruct the young in
the freer Western ways of love and courtship, provoke special ten-
sions between generations. We recall the young male respondent
who, caught in the throes of a romantic courtship, turned to foreign
movies for guidance. Another young Muslim girl acknowledged
the tutelar)' role of such movies:

When they see a love story full of kissing, the young men or women
get so excited as to go directly from the movie to practice what they
have seen. (12-1)

Wc here leave open the question whether this maiden is testifying

( 194 ) The Arab Worlds

to her own responses or those of her peers. In either case, it is clear
why older, traditional folk regard the movies as a corrupting in-
fluence among the young.

The reactions of a young, educated Lebanese interviewer to a
71-year-old village elder whom he interviewed (308) illuminates
the personal meaning of this conflict between generations. The
elder yearns for the role of kindly aged adviser to the obedient
and respectful young, but instead is relegated to the comic role
of a futile and rancorous oldster. “He thought I wanted to get some
information from him because he is the oldest man in the place,”
the young interviewer noted. But this seemed mere pretension,
for “his information in some fields was practically nil”— and these
fields comprised the whole range of themes and experiences which
mattered to the young Modern. Tire old man succeeded only in
boring the interviewer: “All he wanted to talk about was what
an important person in die village he was.” However, the busi-
nesslike interviewer quickly got down to the matters at hand:

(What about the behavior of the Americans in world affairs?) I don’t
know. All I know about is this village. I can tell you everything that
happened here since the Turks were here in the great war. (What do
you think of the cinema?) I don’t know, I have never been to what you
call the cinema. Some of the young men go to it. . . . (Newspapers?)
They say the newspaper gives them news about wars and elections.
(Do you miss such news?) I don’t care about it ... as I am living here
I don’t care what happens anywhere else.

Rooted to his village soil, the elder wished to fend off the out-
side world which, in the shape of his own sons, encroached upon
the traditional round of life that gave him security and satisfac-
tion. The interviewer noted that his curses covered “the younger
generation” and “the world today” in one and the same breath.

Before people worshipped Allah, now people are worshipping the
radio. . . . M/ son wants to get one into the house and I will not allow
him to do" that as long as I live ... it is the work of the devils. . . .

In rejecting even the radio, “the oldest man in the village” per-
sonifies an extreme constrictive reaction. More often there is accept-
ance of radio and press, while movies are condemned as seductive
and sinful. An illiterate and destitute Shffi shoemaker in Saida
took this view, though he is as traditional in his way as “the oldest
man. The shoemaker was appalled, for example, by the projective
questions in the interview. When asked what would be his policies,

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 195 )

if lie were editor of a newspaper, lie reproached the interviewer:
‘'You want to laugh at me, master. The editor of a newspaper. Tins
is the work of one like you." ("With ail respect to you,” the inter-
viewer insisted, "just suppose you were the editor of a newspaper .”)
"Suppose the impossible! Change the question, master, change
it!" (Oil) ,

And change it die interviewer did because, as he noted, the
shoemaker was making all kinds of frantic movements with his
head and hands. When asked to imagine himself as President of
Lebanon, the shoemaker was also visibly distressed. But when
assured that "they" would not laugh at him for presumption, he
said: "The first thing I will do is find work for everybody. [I would]
take the money from diose who have it and employ people to
work. (What else would you do?) Is not that enough to find work
for everybody?’’ This Traditional looks no farther for himself than
finding money "for the bread and olives of my family .”

But the same shoemaker acknowledges the importance of media
to the status of younger people, when he tells of his desire to buy
a radio for his son. The reason is that he longs to see the boy held
in the same respect as his Christian rival— a young man whose radio-
listening has made him tire new neighborhood Wise Man.

[When] the son of our Christian neighbor comes to the shop next
to our house . . . everybody there listens to him talking. ... He talks
about the war in Korea ns if he were there and he just arrived. I asked
him how he got his information and he said from the radio. . . . When
my son goes [to the shop] nobody remarks Iris presence. ... I wish
my son had a radio and could talk about the Korean War like our neigh-
bor's son docs.

Although die shoemaker wishes his son to have contact with the
radio, he draw’s limits when it comes to the cinema. Arabic films
he can understand. “Of course,” he says, they are better than for-
eign films. “You see people of your own race having the same
language and manners as you do. You see somebody having a
nargile (bubble-pipe) near him. You see Arab coats . . .” Egyptian
films lev>’ no tax on the imagination and require no adjustment to
new manners, fashions, language or morals. What he finds intol-
erable is tire young people’s search for the opposite— their fascina-
tion by tire strange and new' and foreign. The shoemaker frowns
upon "those boys that go to American movies . , . they get spoiled.”

I have a son that works the whole day; in the evening he goes to the

( 196 ) The Arab Worlds

cinema. So now he wants to buy a hat, he wants long trousers, he wants
to buy a revolver and I don’t know what else.

Nowhere else in the Arab lands have the village youth estab-
lished themselves in so strong a position vis-ci-vis their elders.
Through their mobility, literacy, media exposure they are taking
over the opinion leadership of rural Lebanon on larger public
issues. In this phase of modernization, Lebanon is far ahead of its
neighbors, among whom the public role of rural youth is not yet
an issue. Along with this, in Lebanon, has arisen a modem version
of the “problem of women” that is barely visible outside cosmo-
politan circles in other Arab countries.

4. Women and die Media

As the modem media arm disputants in the contest between
generations, so they equip combatants in the “war between the
sexes.” Occasional male reformers, like Qasim Amin, have stressed
the strategic role of women in Middle Eastern society . 32 These
reformers argue that the “relay” functions of women in family and
community, their dominance in childraising, put them in a position
to retard or encourage modernization. But such arguments have
foundered upon the culture of male vanity which is imbedded in
traditional lifeways. The basic new impetus has come not from
social theory or the small indigenous feminist movement, but from
the stream of Western communications. Western movies project
upon Arab screens examples of female behavior remarkable by any
standards and revolutionary in their impact upon die traditional
values of a “male vanity” culture. Says Hourani:

The process of change is being speeded by one manifestation of
Western civilization above all: the film which expresses a way of feminine
life, and a conception of the relations between men and women, which
are far from those prevalent in the Islamic world. 33

Radio and print also are important transmitters of the modem
images of women. The personal testimony in die interviews shows
how diey are transforming traditional conceptions of womans
proper roles.

The Arab female figure most frequently portrayed in the West
is a pajama-clad denizen of some portly Sultan’s harem. This fan-
tastic image does reflect the historic isolation and subordination of

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 197 )

women, the sharp division of labor between the sexes, their restric-
tion to the roles of submissive daughter and compliant concubine
and obedient wife. At a very tender age it is impressed upon an
Arab girl that she must practice rigid self-control. She is taught to
internalize her fathers fear that she will bring shame upon his
house by premarital or extramarital adventures. It is less her soul
which is at stake, for this is of relatively small importance, than
the good repute of her father. Indeed the Arabic term ‘ircl, which
derives from the verb to show oneself, has come to mean family
honor. A Palestinian Muslim hesitates to send his small daughter
as a bride to a strange village, not because of fears for her liappi-
ncss, but because "she is still so young that she does not under-
stand how to protect our honor among strangers.” 34 A brother,
ns deputy for the father, is obliged all his life to answer for his
sisters behavior. To maintain the honor of his house, he must
obtain redress for her from others and administer punishment to
her for her own transgressions. The single Arabic term for both
lord and husband ( ba'al ) tersely illustrates the traditionally asym-
metric marriage relationship of the East.

An American teacher in an Arab secondary school, attempting
to discipline the boys, found that confining them to an odious dun-
geon-like basement, without light and full of scorpions, was far
less effective than simply addressing them in the feminine form
of Arabic. Whereas solitary confinement was met with quiet stoicism
and dignity, the latter measure forced them to cringe and beg for
an end to the punishment. 33 The masculine-feminine dichotomy is
nowhere sharper than in die Arab world, as befits what David
Riesman has called a "male vanity culture.”

Dress, always an overt differentiator between classes, sects,
trades and sexes, has imposed special requirements upon females
firing under Islam. 30 Segregation of women was reinforced by’
lobes concealing the form and veils concealing the face. These tra-
ditional ways have resisted even the power of dictators. Reza Shah
forced Iranian women to discard their cliodors, but many again
hid their bodies under the next regime. Atatiirk frowned upon,
but more wisely never outlawed, the veil— which is still a matter
for emotion in Turkey. “I’d like to tear it from their faces,” a clue
young woman at the University of Ankara told me in 1954, speaking
of her veiled elder sisters in the street.

The educational system, deriving from the same perspective as

( 198 ) The Arab Worlds

seclusion and veiling, also excluded women from participation in
public life. Although ancient Islam boasted great poetesses, learn-
ing was wedded by tradition to Koranic study and the Holy Book
was considered beyond female capacities. Only the rare highborn
woman surmounted social obstacles to die acquisition of the learned
arts. Despite the spread of education in recent decades, a large
gap remains: even in Turkey 35 per cent males but only 14 per
cent females can read and write. These perspectives change slowly.
Atatiirk created coeducational Village Institutes to train young
teachers. But his successors, three decades later, yielded to per-
sistent popular feeling that coeducation stimulated dangerous ideas;
hence “separate but equal” facilities for the endangered boys and
girls were established.

When Justice Douglas visited Lebanon in 1951, he saw a hus-
band beat, curse and drive off his wife because she had allowed
her veil to slip. The man returned later to beg the astonished jus-
tice's pardon for the shamefulness of his wife's behavior. But
Douglas also attended mixed parties at which gracious, unveiled
ladies presided as hostesses with perfect aplomb. 37 The old and new
styles still jostle each other, but Arab women have attained a
greater amount of freedom in Lebanon than elsewhere. Muslim
women are relatively emancipated from the traditional chattel
status, and for Christian women conditions were rarely as harsh.
Many a rural woman is now sift al-bayt (mistress of the house) in
the modern sense rather than a traditional beast of burden. In
1953 educated women exercised the franchise. They moved to their
present position through the same process of social change which
has transformed the Lebanese village. 38

Christian women in Lebanon got their start through missionary
educational institutions. As early as the 1830’s there were two mis-
sionary schools exclusively for girls. In 1860, the American School
for Girls was founded; in 1921-23 the American University opened
its doors to women and gave them access to professional careers.
By 1942-43 over half of the students in foreign schools and about
one-third in public schools were girls, a sharp contrast with the
virtual absence of rural coeducation elsewhere in Arab Asia and its
retreat in Turkey. 39 Today there are some Lebanese women in
nearly all professions. These form a feminine corps more akin to
career women in the West than to the uneducated women of then
own country.

Lebanon: Ttco Worlds in Small Compass { 199 )

With these developments, the "problem of women" emerges in
Lebanon on a level of modernity not yet conceivable in other Arab
lands. But problems there are. In any society not in imminent
danger of collapse, conformity mechanisms tend to be stronger
than impulses to deviation. In the Middle East acquiescence re-
mains the dominant response among women, who are often the
most stolid guardians of custom and routine. Women more often
than men insist upon exaggerated forms of superstitious ritual.'* 0
Traditional women often oppose the mass media, along with other
agencies of the Modem style, most vociferously. An amusing case
is the labor crew foreman who, having married a shrew for her
wealth and prestige as daughter of a village elder, now complains
that she stands between liim and the media:

I am afraid to go to the movies. (Why?) My wife doesn’t want me
to go. (Why?) Because she says that I see girls there and they take
away my brains. (Do yon go?) Sometimes. (Well, now, what do you
really think about the movies?) If you don’t tell my wife, I think they’re
wonderful! (How about the radio? Why don’t you listen?) My wife.
(How could she tell if you listened?) She says she can smell it! (What
would have to happen for you to listen to the radio?) Remove my wife
away.

By definition, Traditional women are content to accept the
role and status assigned them. They find it natural, or at least
comfortable, to defer to the superior talents of men. An old Shi‘a
woman explained that God “gave man a more intelligent mind
and gave him also supreme power over us.” Moreover, as “two
women ore equal to one man, we must obey them and do what
they demand . . . this being the rules of God.” This southern vil-
lager could not understand why everything was turning “upside-
down” in Lebanon. “Here women become men and men women,”
she complained. She would be happy to go to Saudi Arabia, the
citadel of traditional Islam, because there women know their place
and men know how to keep them there. She is opposed to women
"having opinions” on principle: “Our mothers and grandmothers
never cared about the views of the ruling people and what
they do, so why should [we] be different?” (063)

Tlie well-trained young interviewer, suppressing her own femi-
nist preferences, contented herself with putting this woman down
as "ignorant, narrow-minded, and very simple and naive.” But she
could not resist adding: “She is submissive and satisfied in her life.

( 200 ) The Arab Worlds

although there are many things to object to.” The growing con-
viction among young and educated .women that there are “things
to object to” indexes the diffusion of external standards of com-
parison and explains the attractions of Western ways to many re-
spondents. The pull of the West is exerted mainly through the
mass media, of which one educated young woman said:

The articles and broadcasts make us anxious to go and live there
[USA]. Liberty for women. That is what we listen to in their programs.

The theme of freedom was paramount among women exposed to
messages from the West. A young uneducated housewife, bitter
because in her village “we can do nothing in the way of new
without objection or gossip,” would move to America if she had
to leave Lebanon. There she felt sure to find “more freedom . . .

I like to live in America where the people are very good and edu-
cated with living.” (064) The allure of a foreign environment
increases among those who, having formed larger expectations,
feel more deprived by their native milieu. A young girl, chafing
under parental restraints, would like to live in America: “People
there are free in all [ways],” especially women:

They are free to come and go, to choose the life they want to live.
They are independent and responsible for themselves with no father or
mother to count their steps and control their sentences and words. (060)

From Western movies and illustrated magazines there emerges
a picture of glamorous, independent womankind in polar contrast
to the Arab norm of the secluded and subordinated female. The
contrast is perhaps greatest in matters of love-and-marriage. “Our
biggest problems are love problems,” explained a young VOA
listener, “people not being allowed to love those they wish to love,
in most cases. Parents here like to run the lives of their children,
even to marriage.” (401) The last piece of news heard by a young
Muslim girl concerned a maiden who had committed suicide be-
cause she was in love with someone her father rejected. Hollywood
exports fall on fertile soil here. According to one college student,
American movies are not ‘better than films produced in other
countries but they are only rich in love films.” (124) A village
woman reported the tale of a neighbor who moved to Beirut, where
her daughter took to attending the cinema:

The result was seen when the young girl refused to marry a man her

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 201 )

parents chose and they discovered that she wants to marry the one she
loves. All this was because of the ideas and shameful things she saw at
the movies.

The romantic girls thwarted by parental control and village
gossip are not the only ones to seek a freer environment. The
college-educated wife of a professor reveals that women at die
social apex also feel the need for more elbow room than the Arab
environment affords. (003) The interviewer noted that the pro-
fessor’s wife ", is rather popular and has a high status in society.”
She belongs to the Lebanese Women’s Federation, the Advisory
Board of A.U.B. Nursery School, the Y. W. C. A., the Arab Women’s
League. Bui all this social activity seems to her a poor substitute
for professional ambitions ruled out by Arab ideas of proper female
careers. This lady, who listens daily to BBC and reads the Ladies
Home Journal, is aware that occupational mobility is less of a
male monopoly in the West Despite her high status at home she
would like to live in America

because in it I can find . . . freedom. It is a country which recognizes
the ability . , . and the rights of the women. . . . The woman is con-
sidered to be as capable as a man ... in the sense that she can get
any job that she likes.

Other Modems mentioned die greater opportunities for varied
education among Western women, which increase their access to
die professions and politics. This is a radical departure from the
views of Traditional women, one of whom explained why she did
not read die newspapers:

In general most of the material written in newspapers I do not like,
because it deals with politics and I don't care to know about it because
I bate politics and I don’t understand it. I believe it something founded
for men and not women. We have many other diings to be interested in
and to look after than politics. (064)

Two Modem girls, by contrast, mentioned, as their most recent
news, die gift of an airplane made by Syrian women to the Syrian
army. The event symbolized for diem die movement of Arab
women from the confines of the home to the political arena of the
nation.

America represents a life of fun, luxury, good times for Tran-
sitional females. One loves American films because they depict
a way of life without a touch of drabness— it is "full of fun.” From

( 202 ) The Arab Worlds

films and the Ladies Home Journal, she has built up a wondrous
picture of the United States:

It is a fantastic country. It has everything in it and it is a very
beautiful country. It has beautiful great buildings and is full of zoos
and lakes . . . it’s a very prosperous country. (124)

America, for the Transitional female, also gives promise of that
upward mobility which is so hard to achieve at home. A 24-year-
old Armenian shopgirl finds the thought of living in America as
satisfying a fantasy as imagining herself at the top of the Beirut
social ladder. This girl is disgruntled with her lot: “Girls like me”
she says, “who are working and supporting a home and a mother,
face many difficulties ... I have never had enough education.” Her
craving for good living involves her in a vicarious life supplied by
newspapers and movies. She reads only the social page, savoring
items “about expensive and flashy social events at homes of big
shots or in the upper circles. ... It feels like window shopping,
which I do very often.” Films and fashion magazines satisfy this
same urge to “window shop” at the upper crust. She would like
to live in America because of the picture she has built up from
the media:

From the films we see, and from the novels I read, it seems to me
to be a land of plenty. . . . When they show us a film about a family
in the slums . . . they had a frigidaire and an oven and a comfortable
home. Whereas here a family economically more than modest [does]
not own frigidaires. . . . They’re all so well-dressed, I know from their
fashion magazines. ... So a simple working girl like me can easily
afford to live better than I do, allowing herself more fun and more
luxury. (040)

That Lebanese women still feel like a “minority” group was
attested by their characteristic way of responding to our questions
first as women, then as Lebanese or Arabs or Christians. For some
Modem females, the situation is complicated by ambivalence—
they abhor their life in the East but fear they are unsuited for life
in the West. One sad young girl (her eyes were red from crying at
the start of the interview) had been educated in Beirut but was
living with her wealthy family in the only decent house of an impov-
erished southern village. Despite “all the facilities of living,” she
seemed to the interviewer “disappointed in life.” She was bitter
against “the life of woman in the Near East where she is not re-

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 203 )

sported but treated as an animal that has no feeling.” This girl's
discontent is stimulated by her constant exposure to American
communications. "In our country” she says, "wherever we walk
we see something American: books, magazines, goods and schools
, . . In our school nearly every lecture in Fridays assembly was
about America. The documentary films all were about their life
there,” Her favorite magazines are Modern Romances and the
Ladies Home Journal, but most of all she is attracted to Hollywood
films. She considers that "they give us true stories of life with no
artificial or altered scenes” and she finds solace in them:

I go to movies to get many new tilings about the ways of life in for-
eign countries . . . their customs, traditions and habits arc not like ours
In the East. There women are respected and free. Their husbands and
relatives treat them with equality and respect while here in the East
wc are not really treated as human beings. So I find it very pleasant to
see such tilings.

Her favorite movie depicted Ava Gardners success in turning a
respectable man into a gambler. It pleased her because it "shows
the influence of women on men’s life.” But these desires are con-
fined to her fantasy life. Actually, die prospect of living in America
was distasteful, for along with freedom would go overwhelming
responsibility and insecurity. Several Modems mentioned the need
of American women to support themselves from an early age; also
the uncertainties of family life, since "almost all marriages end in
divorce." This young girl justified her refusal to imagine living in
the United States:

I am not used to such unlimited freedom which is found in America.
Here in Nnbatich we are controlled and ruled by our traditions and
customs, so if I have to live outside I must live in a place that is not
so different from this because I will not know how to use the freedom
wluch I am not accustomed to.

Some Modem females of this type felt that a more plausible solu-
tion for them was Beiruti If an overseas move had to be contem-
plated, then England (which "is still conservative and traditional”)
would be more suitable than America or even Fr an ce.

While the media bring new images, they do not play only a
disruptive role in the Lebanese social setting. As the Beduin patri-
arch who listens only to the Koran and Arab music uses the media
to fortify his traditional ways, so radio plays a similar role for some

( 204 ) The Arab Worlds

housewives. A village wife, who sometimes resents the narrowness
of her milieu and yearns for American freedom, has learned to
combine innovational and traditional ways with good grace. She
considers radio “the blessing of the twentieth century,” for it
brightens her day, teaches her useful skills and how to keep happy.
Her favorite programs consist of:

Talks and lectures that interest women most of all. Sometimes we
have good advice how to care for our children, how to prevent diseases,
and how to keep happy. They give us good recipes. This program has
many times good stories that teach us a lesson about life. (064)

As the American housewife uses soap operas to fill her day and
satisfy her needs, so this young Lebanese woman finds gratification
through borrowed experience . 41 The media from abroad are creat-
ing a growing market for the Western image of the enlightened
and independent woman who enjoys the material amenities, the
wider education, employment, deference and marital equality.
The attraction is strong, but new desire gestates long before it
overcomes the safety of conformism. The personal cost of radical
social change leads some potential Modems to prefer the familiar
blend of present comforts and vexations to the hazards of gambling
for higher stakes.

So the “problem of women ” in Lebanon is posed on a level
parallel to its debate in the West— the West of not more than
a generation or so ago. As compared with their still submerged
position elsewhere in Arab Asia, the rural youth have emerged
and the women are emerging in Lebanon. Modernization of the
traditional “male vanity culture” brings its own problems but, as
we have seen, they are new issues for the Middle East in a distinctly
modern formulation.

Such problems can be permitted to emerge in the public forum
because Lebanon has developed a relatively stable polity with
modem dimensions. It is not ridden by traditionalist fears that
public awareness of internal social problems must inevitably under-
mine the entire structure of authority. Lebanon is not without its
political problems, but these have been reduced from the catastro-
phic proportions that divide other\Arab lands to issues that can be
managed by rational discussion, negotiation and compromise. We
conclude our case study with a brief comment on Lebanese politics.

Lebanon : Tica Worlds In Small Compass

(£ 05 )

5. Problems of Modem Governance

Having passed through the dramatic early phases of moderni-
zation long ago, Lebanon today suffers only a milder form of the
Arab region's political malaise. Its postwar cotip d'etat was a blood-
less one, led by a social reformer with the cooperation of shop-
kcepers-not by army officers backed with street mobs, as in Egypt
and Syria. Its political atmosphere is freer than elsewhere in the
area. However, Lebanon's potentials for a fully participant democ-
racy are still largely unrealized. Great political difficulties are
imposed by Lebanon’s advanced position in a retrograde area—
Westernized at the entry to Arab Asia, modernized at the center
of Islamic tradition. Lebanon’s division from its neighbors stems
from, and in turn reinforces, its internal division. Not powerful
enough to impose its leadership on the area, Lebanon must tem-
porize. Unable to resist completely the area’s dominant Arab-Islam
syndrome, unwilling to abandon its own Christian-modern position,
the Lebanese leadership straddles the two value-systems. This
tends to widen rather than bridge the ambivalence of ordinary
citizens, of which a brilliant Lebanese Christian, Albert Hourani,
once wrote:

To be a Levantine is to live in two worlds or more at once, without
belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms which
indicate the possession of a certain nationality, religion or culture, with-
out actually possessing it. It is no longer to have standard values of
one’s own, not to be able to create but only able to imitate. It is to
belong to no community and to possess nothing of one’s own. It reveals
itself in lostncss, pretentiousness, cynicism, and despair.

The result, on the level of national politics, is that Western
governmental institutions operate in Middle Eastern style. A partly
Europeanized economy operates without modem social controls.
There is a chronic lack of die “capacity ... to dispense with small
gains in order later to secure more important ones.”'* 2

The usual political problems of social change are compounded
in Lebanon by its unique religious composition. None of the seven
major sects constitutes a majority. The close balance between
Christians and Muslims ties internal problems to an unceasing
struggle on the level of international politics, between Westward-
oriented Christians and Arab-oriented Muslims, between conflicting

( 206 ) The Arab Worlds

images of Lebanon as the Christian “foyer” to the Middle East and
as the province of an Arab state. 43

These international considerations are inseparable from internal
politics. Only the claim that Lebanon must protect a Christian
majority justified, from the start, its independent existence in the
face of pan-Arabism. This imposed political institutions based on
a numerical Christian predominance by convention (if not in fact)
and on the continuation of separatist communal structures. With
these institutions, Lebanon has safeguarded its independence for
a decade and steered between the shoals of world bipolarity. But
the external balance is increasingly precarious, due to the rising
threat to Christian majority status engendered by the higher Muslim
birth rate and by the influx of 130,000 Palestinian refugees. In-
ternally, as Lebanese Modems complain, the price of the sectarian
system also has been high. It has been politically impossible, for
example, to authorize an official population census (which would
reflect the Muslim increase ) . This deprives Lebanon of some mod-
em techniques of government. Further, by constitutional provision
the religious communities must receive equitable representation
in both government and bureaucracy. The highest executive offices,
the legislative seats, all levels of administrative position are allo-
cated on a sectarian basis. Despite its limited cadre of competent
administrators, only the proper religionist can be picked for a job
—a man’s denomination takes priority over his capacity.

Sectarianism, authorized by public law and administrative fiat,
perpetuates ancient loyalties at the expense of the larger national
identification. The clan power of the Druze feudal leaders augments
the authority bestowed by the communal system. The widespread
tendency of parents to choose their children’s schools according
to religious affiliation transmits sectarianism through the genera-
tions. 44 The Lebanese interviews revealed a similar tendency in
media behavior. Choice of a newspaper often was justified solely
because its editor belonged to the respondent’s sect; hence it gave
him news of his own people and alerted him to the sectarian “line
on public issues. The most vitriolic comments usually were directed
at editors belonging to rival sects.

This is traditional in the Middle East, where religion has always
claimed priority among the secondary symbols of identification.
A Middle Easterner related himself to his society by way of his
sect, and Muslim doctrine on the dhimmi as well as the Ottoman

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 207 )

millet system accorded cultural and legal authority to recognized
sects. “To leave one's sect was to leave one’s whole world, and to
live without loyalties, the protection of a community, the conscious-
ness of solidarity and the comfort of normality.” 45 This profound
linkage of personal identity dies hard.

But new loyalties ore challenging the old. Political parties seek
to cross religious lines in their effort to recruit adherents. Labor
unions are growing in strength and some are beginning to assert
an independent policy. 40 Voluntary' associations that bring together
civic-minded urban men and women are growing: over a third
of the Modems belong to one or more clubs. The American Uni-
versity of Beirut has been a leader in cutting across ethnic and
religious barriers among its heterogeneous student body. The com-
pactness of Lebanon, the good roads and the relatively large num-
ber of vehicles facilitate internal travel and thereby gradually
attenuate the ancient particularism. 47 But the new identifications
of die Modems constantly encounter the hard political fact that
confcssionalism still often defines the avenues to power, wealth
and enlightenment.

Confcssionalism is also associated, especially among Lebanese
Modems, with nepotism, corruption and limitations upon personal
freedom. Owing to the power of feudal bosses and confessional
leaders, the law is not administered impartially by the police or
the judiciary. Nor are personal freedoms assured. Certain urban
groups, such as the Beirut taxi drivers, operate with immunity
from regulation of any sort. 48 Many Lebanese Modems gave reasons
of tliis sort for wanting to live in Britain, where the law is applied
impartially from "a taxi driver to a Minister.” America was chosen
by others because of its freedom of expression. The general dis-
affection, revealed in the 1950 interviews, was to culminate some
eighteen months later in Lebanon’s "Rosewater Revolution,” which
displaced President Bishara al-Khuri after a nine-year rule.

The politically-aware had long been disillusioned, since the
self-government established by the 1926 Constitution was a mere
facade for French control. The low electoral participation in the
intenvar years reflected this disillusion. From 1922 to 1934, the
average number of voters in Beirut, the most politicized section
of the nation, came to about 5 per cent of the city’s population. 49
Tliis electoral apathy reflected the low level of the intenvar party
and parliamentary politics. Insofar as their differences went beyond

( 208 ) The Arab Worlds

personalities, the parties opposed each other on the issue of
Lebanon’s future status. The Constitutional and Liberation Blocs
campaigned for an independent Lebanon; the National Socialists
wanted Lebanon to be absorbed into a unified Syria. Activist
youth groups, loosely allied to the political parties, attracted rest-
less extremists who also clashed over the symbols of a Christian
or Arab Lebanon.

Judging democracy by its local performance, many Lebanese
became skeptical of the supposed benefits of constitutional gov-
ernment. They

began to ask themselves what purpose was served by the existence of
a costly Parliament, filled with landowners and lawyers, wasting its
time in internecine quarrels and showing no interest in the country’s
welfare . . . was it not ridiculous, as well as expensive, for so small a
region to have so grandiose and complex a constitution? 50

The nationalist government established in 1943 brought hope of
reform. But its leaders had never worked out solutions for Leba-
non’s internal problems. They suffered the myopic effects of an
opposition dealing for years in ideology without policy, exerting
influence without responsibility. The good will and support they
earned during the fight for independence was soon dissipated.

The government’s indifference to social reform derived from
its alliance with the wealthy families. Political spokesmen were
often landowning lawyers with vested interests against rearrange-
ments in the social system. Furthermore, their regime depended
upon the quasi-feudal “strong men” who controlled electoral lists
in five of the six national districts and dominated public policy by
bribery and violence. 51 Their henchmen intimidated opponents,
including overly-critical journalists, and were shielded by a venal
judiciary. Corrupt manipulation of public funds did not reach the
colossal Egyptian scale, but it was illustrated by a Minister s black-
market sale of a canned-beef shipment donated by Argentina for
the Palestinian refugees. 52 Constant scandal aroused public indig-
nation and created a crisis in public administration. These signs
of an early-Modem political style, whose sources are “envy and
the feeling of displacement,” Riesman has called “the moralizer-
in-retreat.” 53

The “Rosewater Revolution” was largely a strong show of in-
dignation by the Modems, which paralyzed the cities in September
1952. The shopkeepers closed their shutters. This action, once the

Ischamn: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 209 )

Army derided not to intervene, accomplished the coup (Tetat.
Leadership came from the National Socialist Front, a parliamentary
opposition group, and from newspaper publishers who had persist-
ently defied suspension, imprisonment and fining to denounce
government corruption. The coup was interpreted as a step toward
political modemization-“an encouraging sign of the power of
public opinion and its ability to translate itself into action.” 51 It
registered a widespread demand for political participation among
Modems outraged by the inertia of traditional ways.

Some major alterations in the approved political style did follow.
Voting was made compulsory for all males and permissible for
educated women. Over the vociferous opposition of the feudal
leaders, their power was diminished by increasing the five electoral
districts to 33, while the number of seats in the Chamber of Depu-
ties was decreased from 77 to 44. 55 Although marked by some
violence and intimidation, a sign of change was the election of
some Independents who had campaigned on their own rather than
as appendages to the election list of a feudal leader. 50

But these shifts in political style did not alter the underlying
distribution of power. No permanent organization harnessed the
energy of the oppositionists. The Popular Front was dissolved and
its leader Kemal Jumblat was repudiated by articulate segments of
the elite. (His radical program found no echo except among Com-
munists, who sponsored a rival group using these slogans.) 57 The
paradox of Lebanese politics is suggested by tin's reform leaders
support— which came not from like-minded modernizers, but from
Druze peasants who automatically voted for Jumblat as their clan
head. Tire outcome of voting on such premises was that, in 1953,
many old politicians repudiated a scant ten months earlier were
returned to Parliament. 58 What had changed was the legal author-
ization of wider and freer political participation; what remained
the same was the social setting which impairs the efficient opera-
tion of modem representative institutions.

At the time of the survey, taken soon after the dissolution of
the customs union with Syria, the country was in a major postwar
economic slump reflected in abnormally high prices and wide-
spread unemployment. 59 Concern with economic issues pervaded the
interviews. Actually, the distribution of wealth exhibits less dis-
parity in Lebanon than elsewhere in the Arab world: smallholders
and tradesmen form an intermediate class between fellahin and

( 210 ) The Arab Worlds

plutocracy; and per capita wealth is high by Middle Eastern
standards. But the respondents suffered from “relative deprivation.”
Constant exposure to modem achievements led them to deprecate
their standard of living vis-a-vis the West, rather than celebrate
it relative to other Eastern countries. Great bitterness was expressed
over World War II profiteering, unregulated by government policy,
which enriched “some hundreds of merchants, industrialists, entre-
preneurs and ‘operators’ (Brasseurs d’affaires).” While castigating
the postwar urban plutocracy, many respondents noted that the
middle class, farmers and laborers had experienced an appreciable
decline in living standard.

To these conditions the three types responded in their charac-
teristically diverse ways. Traditionals emphasized jobs and bread.
A poor illiterate laborer in a clinic said her problem was

My work— eating— whether I will have enough to get food at the end
of the month. Or enough clothes for my mother, my nephew and my-
self. (031)

Her opinions about international politics favored any state of
affairs in which she would “not have to worry about rice and bread
any more.” Her concern was with subsistence rather than mobility.
She felt that

People with common sense think this way: This is my station and
I have to do my work properly. My master’s station is above mine and
he has his own work to do. We must be content with what God gives
us. (031)

In contrast, the Transitionals were more concerned with living
standards. They have acquired the desires for cash and consumption
that spell social mobility. When the local environment does not
pro vide oppdr h’ nities to match his desires, the genuine Transitional
turns his gaze outward and beyond. The key role of the modem
West as a reference group for modernizing Lebanese is reflected
in the words about America uttered by a Transitional clerk who
had been disappointed in hiss hopes of becoming a lawyer:

I understand that even if you have a low background, but can prove
vourself capable of doing well in a career or profession, you may attain
heights I would never dream of obtaining here. (131)

He was echoed by a young law student who wanted to emigrate

to America:

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass { 211 )

American people appreciate every self-made man so that if some-
body starts from zero and reaches a high standard of living, nobody
will ever complain about him, (008)

With emigration less easy now than it used to be, frustration is
likely to cause alienation of mobile-minded young men who seek
access to elite status, “A political and social evolution to demagogic
tendencies is much more to be feared,” writes Menassa, "since the
majority of intellectuals have seen their living standard lowered.”
These demands for greater shares of wealth and security define
the modernizing issue for the Lebanese economy. This is the
familiar issue of "wide divergence between private and social gains
which is a feature of undeveloped countries.” 00 The considerable
wealth that now courses through the economy is cornered by the
few instead of diffused among the many. Equally challenging is
die structural imbalance. Limited by size and resources, naturally
an entrepdt, Lebanon will always be more a producer of services
than of goods. While Syria exports goods equal in value to 70
percent of its imports, Lebanon exports products worth less than
10 per cent of its imports. An oft-quoted anecdote tells of the
European economist commissioned to survey the Lebanese economy.
After a careful study', he concluded: "I don't know what it is that
you arc doing, but whatever it is, keep on doing it.” By ordinary
standards, the Lebanese should be bankrupt. But by a fantastic
series of service transactions and invisible exports this "nation of
traders” somehow balances its accounts and makes up annual
deficits. 61

A long history of such achievements has developed individual
ingenuity aplenty among the Lebanese. They are well aware of
their long lead in modernization over their neighbors. On the day
tliis is written, a front-page editorial in L’Orient of Beirut reviews
UN statistics on Asian food consumption, per capita income, life
expectancy (27 years in India). Concludes the editorialist: "No
Lebanese could say his country was in such a state.” 02 The editori-
alist carefully avoided any direct comparisons with Egypt or Syria,
with Jordan or Iran. This editorial discretion, by now habitual,
illustrates a major source of constriction upon Lebanese modern-
ization in the present and immediate future.

Lebanese modernity' is nowadays inhibited by the fresh saliency
given to the Arab-Muslim syndrome among its neighbors. Egypt
and Syria have built their violent and unstable new policies around

( 212 ) The Arab Worlds

this traditionalist symbolism which Lebanon, over modernizing
generations, had gone far toward replacing by more relevant issues
and more efficacious values. How shall Lebanon, with a population
that is officially just under half (and actually just over half) Arab-
Muslim, cope with the reinvigorated appeal to these ancient loyal-
ties launched by its massive neighbors?

Since Lebanese modernizers are well aware of the “natural
limits” imposed by their own size and resources, they have followed
the route of discretion. Not powerful enough to control the Egyp-
tian-Syrian storms, they have sought to ride them out. But this
route has given access to a new set of externally imposed “political
limits.” The dispirited and abortive operation of participant politics
within Lebanon, over the past decade, reflects in some measure the
jamming of its modernist symbols of national consensus by the
traditionalist Arab-Muslim symbols superimposed through Cairo’s
Voice of tire Arabs. These new resonances have diverted many
Lebanese Muslims, and deterred many Lebanese Christians, from
their previously set course and pace of modernization.

In such ways do politics and communication interact in the
living Middle East. The new pan-Arabism has redefined Lebanon’s
Christian-Muslim problem, which had been headed toward ra-
tional and secular solutions of modem inspiration, in such a way
as to intimidate the Modernists and encourage the Traditionalists
in both parishes. But it is no easy matter to reverse a century of
internalized social change by an external campaign through the
mass media. Some Lebanese Moderns have come to regard the
new pan-Arabism as mainly a strident tone of voice broadcast
from Cairo. Recognizing, further, that in the field of public com-
munication the Lebanese have a long historic advantage, these
individuals have begun to take heart.

There are signs in the mass media of a new determination,
without abandoning discretion, to reactivate Lebanese ingenuity.
The editorial in UOrient cited above is an example. That Leban-
ese, both Christian and Muslim, are considerably better-off than
their Middle East neighbors is the focal argument. To retain its
force, it must continue to correspond to the observable facts.
Lebanon must build its future upon the modernity which is its
distinctive achievement, rather than conceal it in the hope that
others less favored will not notice. Such a course would have im-
portant implications for Lebanese politics and communications.

Lebanon: Two Worlds in Small Compass ( 213 )

To reinstate the privacy of modem symbols among the Lebanese
population, both Christian and Muslim, requires a more widespread
diffusion of political power and responsibility. This, in turn, can
be sustained only through a style of public communication that
enables more Lebanese to examine their situation candidly, to
assess its benefits soberly, and to support the direction of maximum
effort required by the private and public welfare. Lebanon’s cross-
roads today illustrates our earlier proposition that no modem
society can function efficiently without a modem system of public
communication. This locates a critical function in the mass media.
Upon its effective performance may hinge the future of Lebanese
modernization.

e e o

As of March 1958, when I revisited Lebanon briefly, the situa-
tion sketched in the preceding five paragraphs had deepened. The
new United Arab Republic posed the familiar problem of Egypto-
Syrian "encirclement” in more urgent form for Lebanon— now
flanked, on the other side, by the Iraqi-Jordan Federation. The
issue was variously phrased: Would Nasser permit Lebanon to
remain independent? Should Lebanon wish to remain independ-
ent? The tension generated between external pressures of the
Arab-Muslim syndrome and the internal needs of Lebanese mod-
ernity was acute.

Where a Muslim majority has long felt deprived by the sectarian
system, as in Tripoli and sections of the Beka'a Valley which tra-
verse the road to Damascus, there the call of Arab Nationalism is
likely to be heard above the claims of Lebanese nationality. Among
Christians and the modernized element of Muslims, who have a
stake and a part in their society, the appeal of dependence upon
Nasser is likely to fade if the price entails loss of personal par-
ticipation in an autonomous nation.

In the conversations I heard, anxiety was high and explosions
sounded imminent. Where would Lebanon be after the smoke had
cleared? Underlying die political discussions of the moment, it
seemed to me, was a profound sense that the special Levantine
genius would continue to operate best by living in two worlds at
once without belonging to either.

VII.

Egypt: The Vicious Circle

“Our thoughts are an effort to explore within our-
selves— to discover who we are and what our role is
to be."

— Gamal ‘Abdul Nasser

“It is true that most of our people are still illiterate.
But politically that counts far less than it did twenty
years ago. . . . Radio has changed everything. . . .
Today people in the most remote villages hear of what
is happening everywhere and form their opinions.
Leaders cannot govern as they once did. We live in a
new world.”

—Nasser

THE STRUGGLE of modernization has scarred the elite
of every Middle Eastern land, and none more deeply than the
Egyptian. Their frustrations arc deeper because their aspirations
are higher and tire obstacles greater. The Egyptian elite, after a
half-century of continuous contact with the British, are at home
in the modem world. But the nation for which they speak has
made only marginal approaches to modernity. A population whose
birth rate quickly engulfs every gain of modem technique within
a swollen tide of ancient needs must, as the Red Queen told
Alice, run all it can to stay in the same place. “If you want to
get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as thatl
To break out of the vicious circle of poverty which has been
Egypt’s destiny will require herculean efforts over a long, hard
course. Egypt confronts the process of modernization with the
most difficult set of natural obstacles in the Arab region, compli-
cated by a political style that is out of phase with its capacities.
As this situation has heavily politicized public communication in
Egypt, the present chapter deals with communication as a political
instrument in a highly unstable society.

( 214 )

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( £15 )

The race for internal growth is impeded by the concurrent
search of Egypt’s elite for a large place in the world arena. But
the reach exceeds the grasp. Elite aspirations often reflect personal
anxiety with little regard to political arithmetic. As they respond
to the diverse challenges of social change by such grand schemes
as the Aswan Dam, so they seek to solve all the problems of
national posture at once by such vast dreams as "the Arab na-
tion.” When next steps are guided by such distant goals, there is
bound to be much stumbling. Hardly any commentator has failed
to note the erratic effect upon Egyptian progress of these "illu-
sions of grandeur.” One states the case in summary fashion: “The
other Middle East countries are far more realistic than Egypt
because they do not, like her, consider themselves Great Powers .” 1

The desire to bridge this gap between elite aspirations and
national capacities directs the flow of public communication in
Egypt. The elite, controlling the sources of communication, shapes
their output to convey its own image of the national future. This
propensity in Egyptian communication has become especially
marked since the survey was made. The seats of power have been
taken over by a youthful military junta armed with an apocalyptic
vision of Egypt’s destiny and their own role in it— “a role in search
of a hero,” as their leader puts it. President Nasser’s autobiography,
appropriately titled Egypt's Liberation , articulates Iris personal
vision in prophetic style:

Every people on earth goes through two revolutions; a political
revolution by which it wrests the right to govern itself . . . and a social
revolution involving the conflict of classes. . . . Peoples preceding us
on the path of human progress . . . have not had to face both simul-
taneously; their revolutions were centimes apart in time. For us, the
terrible experience through which our people are going is that we are
having boll: revolutions at the same time . 2

Linking the goals of popular welfare and national grandeur in
tliis way, in a land inadequately equipped for either, has led to
soul-searching and to bold enterprises. The quotations which open
this chapter indicate that soul-searching has led Nasser on the
quest for a political identity that will fuse the nation and its
leader (“who we are and what our role is to he”); his boldest
enterprises have originated in his conception of radio as a chosen
instrument of national identity. Nasser has sought to cope with

( 216 ) The Arab Worlds

his two revolutions simultaneously by means of a unifying “com-
munication revolution.”

His success in propagating the symbols of Arab nationalism
seems beyond question. The most impressive unifying force among
Egyptians and “neutralist” Arabs today is the personality of Nasser
as reflected through Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs. But there is
reason to ask whether Nasser, while encouraging popular belief
that the dilemma of his twin revolutions is thereby solved, has
not slipped through its horns. It may be that each immediate
gain will turn into a serious net loss on some later reckoning. This
is no prophecy; it is a statement of the conditions of long-run
success imposed on Nasser’s regime by his own communication
strategy. By raising expectations among Egyptians, Nasser has
also raised the standards of performance by which his regime is
judged. Higher hopes require higher payoffs. But the outlook for
conspicuously higher payoffs to the Egyptian population is not
bright. The higher their hopes soar— this is die risk— the easier,
deeper, wider may be their disappointments. To grasp the full
poignancy of this situation, one must see Nasser’s vision of the
Egyptian future against the stupefying obstacles presented by its
current conditions. We begin with the socioeconomic indices of
modernization.

1. The Vicious Circle of Poverty

The vital problem of Egypt is plainly visible to the merest
tourist. Approaching by air, he perceives how narrow is the green
strip of fertile Nile valley by contrast with the vast deserts that
roll endlessly away beyond the horizons. Driving in from Cairo
airport he passes through suburban Heliopolis, where foreigners
and pashas live in villas of surpassing magnificence and mod-
ernity. But he brusquely enters the Middle Eastern world as he
moves toward the metropolitan center, where a substantial popu-
lation has no other housing than the city streets. There walk by
day and sleep by night men and their little- burros, whole families
with their belongings in portable bundles appropriate for the
needs of urban nomads. The massive and incessant life of the
Cairo streets is on a 24-hour daily basis. Caravans arrive at daw
from distant places; several hours later, but before getting very
far into the city, they are caught up by limousines speeding m

Egt/pl; The Viebus Circle ( 217 )

from Heliopolis or crossing the river from Zamalek. Camels stall
Cadillacs as the human mass afoot dominates the roads and regu-
lates the tempo.

The initial predicament is set by a simple statistic: over 20
million people are living on 6 million acres of land— a population
density of 1,198 persons per square wile of habitable land as com-
pared with 27 in Turkey and 44 in the United States. Pestilence
regularly decimates the surplus population. If its birthrate is
among the worlds highest (averaging over 40 per thousand), so
arc its deatlirales. Infant mortality soon reduces the number of
children to feed by half : one out of every four children bom dies
during its first year and another before it is five years old. The
demographer finds that "one of the most striking summary com-
parisons is the age by which one-fourth of the original cohort are
dead. ... 1.1 years in Egypt . . . 51.5 years in the United States
(whites).” The average Egyptians life expectancy at birth is just
half that of a white American: 30.2 years as against 60.6 years. In
the continuous flow of new life, few survive and those not for
long. 3

The lifeways and deathways of a traditional society tend to
become interlocked in a vicious circle of poverty. 4 Escape from
the circle is extremely difficult, since -piecemeal efforts often make
tilings worse in the long run. For example, the ancient system of
basin irrigation was superseded during the late 19th century by
perennial irrigation based on modem methods of dam- and barrage-
construction. Distributing the Nile waters over the cultivated
lands in tins way enabled Egyptians to produce two crops instead
of one each year, at sustained high yields per acre. But the inno-
vation also caused a rise in the water table and a consequent
increase of bilharzia, one of the endemic diseases which sap
vitality and shorten life among the fellahin. Even the survivors suf-
fered ultimately from the imported new technology. In the next
half-century, while cultivated land increased by only 12 %, the
population of Egypt increased by 96.8%. Despite increased pro-
ductivity, there was a “serious drop in real income per head of
rural population.” 5

The lesson of perennial irrigation is not without relevance to
the project for a High Dam at Aswan. Public interest abroad has
been confined to the political question— under whose auspices?
But the essential question is rather: Will the project figure in a

( 218 ) The Arab Worlds

larger design to propel Egypt, finally, into a growth phase; oi
will it stand as a solitary monument to the present ruling junta?
Some competent observers have concluded that, alone, the Aswan
Dam will not pierce a durable pinhole in the self-sealing circle
of agrarian poverty. 6 Only with substantial support on its industrial
flanks can the Dam spearhead a major breakthrough into the
modem world. With this giant step would be needed rising ur-
banization, industrialization, and per capita income. The Egyptian
record on these indices is not encouraging.

During the past half-century no urbanization policy was visible,
From 1897 to 1937 there was only minimal movement, and what
there was went to the six capital cities (Cairo, Alexandria, Port
Said, Suez, Ismailia and Damietta). These increased by 3.8%, while
all provincial cities together increased by only 0.4%. Such hap-
hazard movement, which gave scant relief to the overburdened
fertile strip, occurred while population density was doubling.
During the next decade an astonishing leap (19%) increased pop-
ulation by over 3 million, giving Egypt in 1947 a total of about
20 million, while infant mortality decreased by almost 20% and
life-expectancy showed a corresponding increase of about 8 years. 1

These happy signs, for another society, might have spelled dis-
aster for Egypt. Increasing prosperity with decreasing pestilence
deprived Egypt of the twin institutions which, historically, had
stabilized its vicious circle of poverty. More of this sort of ‘prog-
ress” could have been catastrophic. With more people surviving
infancy and living longer, even Father Nile would at this rate
have been quickly outpaced. But the prosperity was transitory,
for it derived from war-inflated world prices on agricultural com-
modities. When the bubble burst, no real program was available
(or ever produced) for deploying idle fanners into urban jobs.

During the past decades, rural population finally did start mov-
ing, but it was simply jettisoned into an already overflowing city.
While total population was increasing by 20%, Cairo increased by
over 60%. During 1937-1947 the population increase of Cairo alone
was greater than the increase of the 20 largest towns combined.
In such displacement, new bodies are simply agglutinated to a
floating urban mass, converting their old indolence into a new
aimlessness. The ancient metropolis has not the social capacity
to absorb them as participants, and these urbanized nomads in-

Egypt: The Vicious Circle (219 )

crease the nation's explosive rather than productive potential. This
tragedy of waste leaves unused the absorptive capacity of towns,
in which, under a rational and comprehensive development policy,
the location of new industries, new schools, new markets, new
media would figure as items in an array. Such a policy, as exhibited
in Turkey and Lebanon, modernizes a society over decades and
generations. No country has yet shown how this can be accom-
plished in a hurry.

How have Egyptians been getting their living and how much
of a living have they been getting? Over half of the labor force
remains in the agricultural sector, with mobility only at the very
top and bottom of the occupational scale. The increases in "per-
sonal services” and “undefined and unproductive'' occupations
doubtless represent the huge growth of floating population. While
this surplus languishes on the lower periphery of productive life,
the "middle sectors” which distinguish modem society register
only marginal gains. Over the two decades in which modem trans-
port and communications made their most spectacular advances
elsewhere, Egyptian employment in this sector lost ground. The
commercial sector barely held its own. The crucial industrial
sector registered gains that are pitiful by comparison with the
need, growing less than the "elite” sector of public services and
professions.

We shall soon look in detail at this disproportionate bulge in
the elite formations. Here we note the failure of the middle sectors
to provide channels of access for the continually swelling mass.
As the industrial sector absorbed but one new worker for every
ten surplus persons who constituted its potential labor force, the
other nine (already ejected from the land) simply increase the
non-productive floating population. Having neither productive
jobs nor expendable cash, they do not "participate” in economic
life.

Even the one in ten who has been "gainfully employed," as this
tenn is understood in Egypt, functions only nominally as a "con-
sumer” The average weeldy wage of industrial workers during the
postwar period has been 133 P.T. (piastres), or about $5.40, with
little significant gain throughout the decade. Between 1945-1951,
the average annual income increased in the industrial sector from
95 L.E. (Egyptian Lira) to 98 L.E., while the average in the agri-

( 220 ) The Arab Worlds

cultural sector declined from 48 L.E. to 46 L.E. Says Issawi: “In
effect, nearly three-quarters of the whole population are not a
market for industrial products.” 0

The “bulges” continue to swell at the top and the bottom of
Egyptian society. The “average family” cannot expect better quar-
ters than were reported in the 1938 Survey of Poverty, while there
are only 113,000 people engaged in the construction industries. Nor
can a market economy develop where few ever have spare cash,
On the land, too, ownership is heavily concentrated in a relatively
few hands. Two million own less than one feddan and over a half-
million own less than five feddans; together these account for
some 95% of all landowners. 10 While legally protected from ex-
propriation since the British Five-Feddan Law, little has been
done to increase their productivity. 11 Instead, agricultural dis-
parities tend to accelerate and become more acute by comparison
with other sectors, as in the figures in Table 1 worked out by
Issawi. 12

Table J — income Differentials

Occupation

Agricultural Laborer
Industrial Worker
Minister
Bank Chairman

Average Income

10 L. E.
26 L. E.
2,500 L. E.
3,000 L E.

We have stressed the enormity of the bulge in the lower depths,
Not less significant, for the long run, is the corresponding bulge
in the elite levels. That almost as many men are employed in the
bureaucracy and professions as in the whole industrial sector is
■a serious anti-growth mechanism in any economy. That the public
service-professional sector has grown almost twice as fast as the
industrial sector, in the past two decades, indicates that things
have been going from bad to worse.

The way out of the vicious circle requires a coordinated pro-
gram of productive investments located, as Nurkse indicates, to
achieve a general rise in income that will be distributed in reason-
able proportions between consumption and reinvestment. 13 Such
growth would have to reverse Egyptian trends in the distribution
of population, work, and wealth, which have produced a society m
very poor shape. Whereas the typical modem society resembles a
clock, which is most massive around the middle, Egyptian society

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 221 )

is shaped rather like an hour-glass, bulging at both ends and
with hardly any middle at all. An hourglass, too, looks quite stable
until the very' instant when it performs the only movement of which
it is capable— an extreme flip-flop, usually accompanied by a hiss-
ing sound. The figure is exaggerated, but it does suggest the ex-
plosive potential of the Egypt which Nasser inherited.

How, under these conditions, were the Egyptian people dis-
posed toward Nassers dilemma of “the two revolutions”? It is
never certain, in advance, how impoverished people will respond
to the conflicting symbols of NATION and CLASS. Highly tradi-
tionalizcd people often are nonresponsive. Their identifications are
firmly localized in family and community'. The effort to incorporate
such larger entities as Class or Nation within their personal iden-
tity' seems irrelevant or impossible. On what psychic soil did Nasser’s
more complex strategy of fusing the Class-Nation symbols fall?

2. Tlie Revolutionary Symbolisms:
nation and class 0

THE 1951 survey provides some information about the
Egyptian communication arena on the eve of the Revolution. Even
before Nasser launched the official quest for a usable identity,
Egyptian respondents aligned themselves along the axis of political
identification. The choice between national and class symbols,
whereby each respondent defined his public identity, indicated
where he was likely to stand on most issues confronting his country.
Indeed, the way each respondent positioned himself with respect
to the symbols of nationalism usually revealed which of the great
public issues came to lu's attention at all.

Nationalist agitation throughout the land had succeeded, over
several generations, in diffusing among Egyptians of all classes
some measure of "national consciousness.” As the symbols of
nationalism are highly ambiguous, meaning very different ‘ ••
to different men, such consensus provided only' minimum
tees of a common wall on specific issues of public
was little dissent among respondents from .1

* This section is based on the BASR .

Egypt" by P. L. Kendall and B. B. Ringer,
bivalent Character of Nationalism S ■

Opinion Qiwrieriy (Spring 1956).

( 222 ) The Arab Worlds

Egypt should be independent and its corollary that the British oc-
cupation should, somehow, vanish. But the sociology of this limited
dissent is an important clue to the political meaning of Egyptian
attitudes, as is the varying saliency and intensity of the assent
The tonality of assent ranged from an upper extreme of feeling
that nothing in the world could be more urgent than Egyptian
independence to a lower extreme of tolerant indifference. Persons
ranged at the different levels of this scale were found to differ
correspondingly on most essential questions of personal position
and public posture.

To deal with the sociological distribution of these attitudes, re- ■
spondents were classified on a different basis than in preceding
case studies. Whereas our Turkish respondents had been classified
initially by the range of their opinions, and Lebanese respondents
by their radio-listening habits, the Egyptian respondents were sorted
by their jobs. As this proved useful in differentiating responses to
the symbols of CLASS and NATION, the 262 respondents ( out of
331 ) whose jobs were known and classifiable are presented in the
four large occupational categories: Professional, Write Collar,
Workers, Fanners. This produced remarkably regular differences,
also, on the indices of modernization in our basic typology. Tire
cross-tabulations in Table 2 show the differences of education and
status between groups.

Table 2 — Education and Status

EDUCATIONAL LEVEL

Professional

Whlto Collar

Worker

Tatr.tr

Illiterate

_

3%

45%

58%

Elementary School

11

48

40

High School

22

60

7

2

College & University

77

26

-

—

100%

100%

100%

100%

SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS

Destitute

_

9

25

Poor

7

3

74

44

Modest

63

79

16

23

Well Off

26

18

1

8

Rich

4

—

—

—

100%

100%

100%

100%

Totol Respondents

(110)

(35)

(69)

(46)

As one descends the scale from educated and better-off Profes-
sionals to illiterate and impoverished Farmers, as in Tabic 3, the
groups also become more homogeneously rural and Muslim-

(223)

Egypt: The Vicious Circle

Table 3 — Residence and Religion

% Urtng In

*/•

furol Artai

Mutlimt

Prof»jiionol

20

75

While Coder

12

79

Worker

38

93

Former

100

96

These groups make a close fit to our general typology of Modems,
Transitionals and Traditionals. The Professionals— urban, educated,
relatively well-off, and with a substantial admixture of non-Muslims
{mainly Copts, Greeks, Armenians and Jews)— represent the elite
Modem sector of Egyptian society. The White Collar group clusters
at the upper limit of the Transitional type, as defined in Chapter
II, and the Workers aggregate closer to its lower limit. The Fanners
provide, as always, the solid corps of Traditionals. (The data on
media participation, reported in Section 3 below, further show the
close connection between occupational groups and modernization
types.)

The divergent attitudes characteristic of each group are strik-
ingly illustrated by the subtle, yet profound, variants of the one
attitude common to all groups— hostility toward the British, then
still in Egypt The keynote among the Professionals was extreme
ambivalence, an unruly coexistence of love and hate toward the
British. Oriented toward the West by their education, whence they
have derived their conceptions of tile good society, they suffer from
a sense of rejection by the West. Many feel driven, in self-defense,
to turn their rage against the erstwhile object of affection. From
high expectations crushed seems to come their sense of extreme
deprivation. More often than other respondents, the Professionals
justify their hostility in terms of Britain’s "unfulfilled promises.”
(171) This phrase of a young engineer was echoed in many ver-
sions. A woman doctor complained that: "Although Britain preaches
that she deals with Egypt on an equal and friendly basis, she does
the contrary.” (156) The nagging sense of inferiority that under-
lies much of this ambivalent hostility was expressed by a teacher
of social studies: "England has no confidence in us. That is why
they want to keep an army in Egypt” (065)

Hostility was regularly' infused with grudging admiration and
wistful envy. These ambivalent feelings toward Britain underlay
what the preliminary analysis of our data characterized as "im-

( 224 ) The Arab Worlds

potent and shallow” manifestations of nationalism. The Egyptian
elite, as Miss Kendall concluded, “have not developed a real na-
tionalistic movement largely because the countries which they
admire most and therefore want to emulate are, at the same time,
those which they hate most.”

Among White Collar respondents, the expression of Anglophobia
took a quite different form. Hardly touched by the Western stand-
ards which the Professionals acquired through schooling and travel,
the White Collar group exhibited little ambivalence. (We note in
passing that 27 % of the Professionals had travelled outside of Egypt,
mainly in the West, as compared with 6 % of the White Collar
people.) Their hostility toward Britain was uncomplicated and
direct. When asked for their judgment of British behavior in
world affairs, 22 % of the Professionals expressed mixed (partly
favorable) opinions as compared with 6 % of the White Collar
respondents. This difference is noteworthy on the one issue which
found virtual unanimity in principle among Egyptians.

These differences involved more than a tone of voice, as was
shown by responses to the question of what should be done about
getting rid of die British. The Professionals were embarrassed and
evasive, reticent and uncertain. Many of them said that nothing
could be done. Others looked, despite their fervent nationalism,
for help outside Egypt— to the United Nations, to the United States,
to Britain herself. A poignant expression of ambivalence was die
wistful hope that the British sense of “fair play” would one day
convince them voluntarily to leave Egypt for the Egyptians, White
Collar recommendations, by contrast, were simple, direct, active,
even violent: “I would drive the British away” (087); “I would
boycott the English economically” (051); “Importing arms from
any country except England and America . . . not supplying the
British troops in Egypt with daily purchases.” (323) One respond-
ent, asked what he would do about this if he were head of the
government, responded with a comprehensive program of direct
action:

I would do the following things: (1) cut the political and economical
relations between us and Britain; (2) absolutely not cooperate wit
the forces in the [Suez) Canal Zone . . . ; (3) strengthen the Egyptian
army by buying weapons . . . ; (4) if a world war arises, we can stab
from the back; (5) strengthen relations with all nations of the Eastern
camp. (269)

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( £25 )

An interesting aspect of White Collar activism compared with
Professional reticence is that the latter group expressed far more
eloquent and intense concern about getting rid of the British. When
asked "What would you say is the biggest problem that Egypt
as a nation faces today?," the Professionals alone among the four
groups named the British occupation more frequently than all
the issues of social reform combined. Yet, fewer of them responded
in these terms to a subsequent question: "Suppose that you were
made head of die government. What are some of the things you
would do?” By collating the answers to these questions, we can
sec whether each respondents program for Egypt was direedy
related or not to his own prior definition of Egypt’s biggest problem.
This was done with a Professional subgroup of 34 respondents,
evenly divided between those identifying British Occupation rather
than something else (mainly Social Reform) as Egypt’s main prob-
lem. The results are shown in Table 4.

Table 4 — Problems and Programs

Mi Program or

Head of Covernm«nt

EGYPT'S AMIN

PROBLEM IS,

Would Be

Brillth Occupation

Social Reform

Directly Related

5

13

Not Directly Related

12

4

17

17

This evasiveness on Britain among Professionals contrasts with
die uncomplicated White Collar responses to the same questions.
Fewer of them worry so intensely about the British, but those who
do exhibit no anxiety about dealing with them. That is, propor-
tionately fewer White Collar respondents named British Occupa-
tion as Egypt’s biggest problem; but among those who did, 8
out of 9 subsequently proposed vigorous programs directly related
to solving this problem.

Two nuances characterized the aspirations of the Professionals,
as of the Egyptian elite more generally— and these contrapuntal
themes we shall describe more fully as the “Nasser syndrome.”
One was die interlocked desire to be respected by, and disengaged
from, the Western world. This conjunction of desires to be simul-
taneously engaged and disengaged often leads, in the arena of
world politics, to die evasion of current choices. It explains why
the Professionals, who wanted Egypt’s independence, were unable

( 226 ) The Arab Worlds

to endorse such direct action formulae as “Kick the British outl”

The other nuance was a sense of guilt which, among moraliz-
ing intellectuals, often accompanies the rule of pride. On this
point my subsequent interviews, in 1954, were very clear. There
was little dissent among the Egyptian elite from the proposition
that Britain’s home democracy is far more admirable than her
world empire. Or from the corollary proposition that the great
need for developing a democratic Egypt is not necessarily answered,
but may only be evaded, by a policy of global adventurism. Of
those who identified Social Reform as Egypt’s greatest need, some
later evaded this issue by stressing national greatness in their pro-
grammatic proposals. There was an uneasy feeling among the elite
that imperial reveries might be an unworthy sort of self-indulgence
at the expense of their impoverished and needy countrymen. Per-
haps no problem that confronted Nasser was so profoundly com-
plex as this uneasy guilt over the fusion of CLASS and NATION
symbols. Nasser reports, in his autobiography, that this incapaci-
tated substantial segments of the Egyptian elite from effective
action.

The Egyptian farmer, historically, conforms to the picture of
Traditional man— “shut in no less by its habits than by its villages,
writes Habib-Ayrout about the fellahin. 14 The fellah is bound to
his soil by the same constrictive round of life as peasants elsewhere.
His symbols of identity have been confined to work, family,
mosque, village; his wisdom has been the ancient lore transmitted
through time by the tales of father to son, by the training of
mother to daughter. The Arab Conquest, which imposed Islam
upon the fellahin, once brought the world to them. This codified
the unknown world; then, leaving its deposit behind, the wave
receded and the villagers continued their ways much as they haa
done since ancient time. Of the newer secondary symbols ot
political identity, they heard little and remembered less. Father
Ayrout, a Catholic missionary who worked long years among them,
writes: “Patriotism and nationality mean no more to the fellahin
than the ideas of cooperation, public interest, or civic pride.

Yet, Egyptian Farmers are not so completely contained within
their parochial universe as rural people in other Middle Eastern
lands. One explanation is their history. Egypt is the oldest con-
tinuous folk-nation in the world. While the greatest part of
history has been spent under foreign occupation (indeed partly

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 227 )

because of this) the indigenous folk long since acquired the sense
of being “one people.” This sense of a proto-national community
is not found among the Christians of Lebanon, the Druzes of
Syria, the newly-commingled migrants of Jordan, the Kurds of
Turkey, or the fierce autonomous tribesmen of Iran. The proud
thome of Coptic (Christian) spokesmen that they are the original
Egyptian stock is received respectfully in Egypt

Another, perhaps more important, explanation of the strong
national bonds that link rural Egypt to the urban centers is eco-
nomic. Hie creation and control of irrigation channels, allocating
the Nile waters which are the life-blood of rural Egypt, has long
been in the hands of government agents, tying the men on the
land to the men from the cities. Cotton is die basis of the Egyptian
economy. Its distribution has been handled by the cotton factors,
the shippers of Alexandria, and otiier urban visitors, upon whom
die Fanners have learned to depend for the means and rewards
of their productive labors. These visitations have brought the outer
world, continuously over the past decades, into the attention frame
of Egyptian villagers. They have learned diat the rewards from
dicir cotton crop, sold for cash in the world market, fluctuate ac-
cording to the vagaries of circumstance far beyond the confines
of their village. In every rural community I visited during 1954,
some persons had mastered the idea of a fluctuating world market
and explained its local significance to tiieir fellows. Recognition
is fairly widespread that the immediate welfare of each Farmer
is contingent, beyond weather and water, upon distant events in
die world arena of price and power.

Their interest in what happens to the cotton market thus pierces
the shell of Traditional isolationism and extends their horizons
beyond the village limits. It directs their attention especially to
die activity' of their national leaders, who function as their prin-
cipal intermediaries and agents in the vast and remote world upon
which their daily bread depends. At the time of my visit, no inter-
national event had been more clearly' registered in -the conscious-
ness of rural Egyptians than the recent Soviet purchase of their
surplus stocks of cotton. (Nor was Washington’s almost simul-
taneous decision to sell its cotton surplus on the world market,
in competition with Egypt’s current crop, likely to pass unnoticed.)
The Soviet purchase boosted Nassers stock throughout rural Egypt,
much as the postwar decline of world cotton prices undermined

( 228 ) The Arab Worlds

rural support for the regime of King Farouk. The future of cotton
which links the Egyptian hinterland to the wide world, thus bears
directly upon the future shape of Egyptian nationalism. So a per-
ception of their national identity exists among the fellahin; its
potential force for social consensus at the level of national policy
is great.

Among the fellahin, however, the new aspiration toward an
Egypt great in its own right and freely competitive with its former
overlords takes a primitive form. Their Anglophobia is neither the
halting ambivalence of the Professionals nor the ready activism of
the White Collar people, but an intensely personal rejection of a
remote Other (non-Self) on the level of moral judgment, without
any clear definition of problem or implication of program. In inter-
view after interview among the Farmers occurs the same thematic
sentence: "The English are our enemies.” (007, 015, 099, 175, etc.)
The penetration into the collective fellahin conscience of the
equation Inglesi - Evil is expressed by one destitute Farmer, un-
happy over his lot, who expanded the routine formula: "They are
our enemies. People say that they are the roots of all the evils.” (126)

The personalization of public issues is a characteristic mode of
Traditional men. This is illustrated by the very substantial majority
of Fanners who flatly refused when asked whether they would be
willing to live in England. (Only five of the 61 Fanners inter-
viewed said they would be willing.) The rationale of refusal in-
cluded the fear of the new and strange which we have found
among Traditionals in every land. Many added, however, the di-
mension of physical fear. One would not live among the British
"because they shed our blood with their guns” (224); another "be-
cause they hate Egyptians and because they are cruel.” (099)

Whereas most ambivalent Professionals who would not live m
England (and many of them would ) revealed a fear of not being
accepted as social equals, the ego-constrictive Farmers spoke rather
of fear for their personal safety. Threatened deprivation of dignity
creates anxiety only among those who have or seek it; such pre-
occupations seem quite remote from the needs of the Fanners.
They fear from living among the British not social inferiority,
which is their accustomed lot, but rather (lacking the Professionals
acquaintance with British traditions of fair play and justice at
home) tire physical destruction which traditionally resolves per-

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 229 )

sonal enmities in their familiar world. Their nationalism is shaped
“by die inherited framework of Traditional values.

As we turn to the Workers, the climate of opinion undergoes
another significant transformation. In this group appears the clash,
long familiar in the Western world, between the competing sym-
bolisms of NATION and CLASS. Much of modem history has been
written in terms of this conflict; in those Western nations which
remain underdeveloped by twentieth century standards, such as
Spain and Italy, die competition between these symbolisms still
shapes die course of political life. In Egypt, where the quest for
a usable political identity is recent, the symbols of Class have
just emerged and are barely visible in a political vocabulary domi-
nated by the resonant symbols of Nation. As Egypt moves toward
modernity, the class-conflicts that mark a social revolution (to
which Nasser alluded) are likely to find more frequent and intense
expression in the surface of political life. At this point Nasser’s
“crisis of the millstones”— the conflicting demands posed by class
and national interest— may no longer be met by adroit use of the
mass media.

Among die 69 persons classified as Workers, 19 were urban
factory workers whose jobs subject them to the modem industrial
discipline. The views expressed by these 19 Workers, which fore-
cast their reaction to Nasser s New Way, provide dues to the
shape of Egypt’s future. Most striking is the non-saliency of nation-
alist sentiments as compared with Professional, White Collar, and
Farmer respondents. Of die 19, only four considered the achieve-
ment of nationalist goals to be the biggest problem facing Egypt
They express far greater concern with social reform—the problems
of livdihood confronting themselves and their fellow-workers— than
with die need for Egyptian independence. Unlike the Farmers,
who objectively are more impoverished than they, the Workers
give priority' to die problems of dieir nascent dass over the prob-
lems of didr newborn nation.

These priorities can he understood in terms of their life-situation.
Workers in Egyptian sodety today are exposed to die full impact
of modem insecurity'. They are subject to the fluctuating labor re-
quirements of an economy still far from a modem “growth phase,”
in which die modem theory' that widespread distribution of pur-
chasing power is the essential solvent of prosperity seems as yet

( 230 ) The Arab Worlds

irrelevant. Secured by nothing more substantial than the day's
earnings from an uncertain job, there is no mystery in their pan.
mount concern with their daily lot. “I am threatened to be expelled,”
says one such worker, “at any moment the owner of the factory
wants.” (313) Another respondent, employed in a weaving factory,
speaks more comprehensively in the name of his class:

Workers are very poor indeed. They cannot save any money, 1!
he or one of the family falls ill, he cannot call the assistance of a doctor.
Nobody knows what comes with the morrow. The worker is always
worried about his future, and his present is very unhappy. He cannot
look after his family, wife and children as he should. (117)

Not only the day’s contentment, but also the morrow’s security
—this is the characteristic concern of the urban worker. He acquires
a higher level of needs and wants, inevitably, as he moves from
the relative stability of village life to the urban division of labor
on a cash basis. On the farm, subsistence requirements usually
can be met; living among kin and community, help is forthcoming
at times of need. In the city, where each nuclear family is a self-
contained economic unit, even ministration to the sick is done by
a licensed doctor and must be paid for. The migrant learns to
place the higher urban value upon security as he puts behind bin
the communalism of the village.

The familiar process of secularization accompanies urbaniza-
tion in Egypt as elsewhere. While almost all of the Farmers inter-
viewed visit their village mosque daily, the Workers have rupture
this Traditional bond. None goes to the mosque daily; three out
of four go only once a week or less; one out of four never goes
at all— behavior unheard of among the Farmers. With the replace-
ment of old pieties by new secularism goes the replacement of ol
acquiescence by new desires. The urban worker quickly learns the
thoughtways of the consumer. By far the most discontented of the
four groups (over half declaring themselves “very unhappy )> y* e
Workers are disturbed by the discrepancy between their desires
and their resources. One says he is unhappy “because I am poor
and have no money to enjoy myself.” (072) Another “because I
want to live a good life and have not sufficient money. I have a
big family” (191)

The Workers are Transitionals, showing the impact of modern
desires. But they may be outrunning their social context. ‘Enjoy
myself’ and “Live a good life”— these are phrases appropriate to

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 231 )

die consumer of abundance in a highly productive and widely par-
ticipant society. On the lips of workers in Egypt, where scarcity
rules, these plirases may augur a time of troubles ahead. They
bespeak desires Uiat will not easily be satisfied. So long as a poor
man laments his lot we are in the Traditional universe symbolized
by Scriptural glorification of poverty and castigation of wealth.
("Sooner shall a camel pass through the eye of a needle . . eta)
Once many poor men phrase their common complaints against
poverty in terms of their joint concerns as workers, then we are
abruptly in the modem world of Class consciousness.

Tills is a significant feature of the Egyptian Workers attitude
toward die symbols of nationality. He is less interested in the
common identity as Egyptian which he shares with all his country-
men than in tire common identity as Worker which he shares with
a more homogeneous segment among them. The future of Egypt
will be different because many an urban worker has acquired the
image of himself as Worker. The symbols of Nation now confront
a much more potent adversary than the British— namely, the symbols
of Class. This is Nasser’s “crisis of the millstones”— his predicament
of managing simultaneously the symbols of social revolution and
national revolution.

On die side of political attitudes, it is clear that Nasser tackled
a difficult problem when he decided that the sharply stratified
Egyptians must reach minimum agreement on a national ideology
in order to sustain an effective capacity for national action. But
dicre were also important technical problems: Were means avail-
able for die rapid diffusion of a comprehensive secondary symbol-
ism? Assuming tiiat Nasser could define a political identity that
would unify the cloven strata of living Egyptians, which media
could he use to reach which groups, and how use them to best
advantage? The 1951 survey dealt with matters relevant to these
media problems, as they stood when Nasser came to face them.

3. The Media and the Revolutions

In general, the patterns of media participation in 1951 reflected
the sociological and attitudinal differences that have just been
reviewed. As expected. Professionals were most participant and
Fanners least participant. But our interest centers on the early-
Transitional group of Workers, The mass media, in modernizing

( 232 ) The Arab Worlds

societies, are most influential in shaping the lives of people newly
located in the sectors of maximum transition. This involves th
chicken-and-egg relationship we have already described: those
who are modernizing tend to be more accessible to the media;
media participation, in turn, teaches them modernity. The new
urban Workers are such a group in Egypt today. Pervasive illiteracy
reduces their newspaper consumption, but despite this they par-
ticipate in radio and movies almost as fully as the upper social
groups.

Table 5 — High Consumers of Radio and Movies

Professional White Collar Workers forniti

Liston to radio daily 89% 82% 78% 41 k

See movies weekly 46 50 45 j

From the media the Workers learn how to look at their new social
role, and in the media they seek out clues and confirmations for
their preferred perceptions of the world around them.

One Worker, having acquired a vivid sense of his class-identity,
made this his standard for judging the media. Thus he ms’ r e
al-Ahram because it was read by “other people” and adds: T never
see a worker reading al-Ahram. Workers read al-Assas and some-
times al-Misri.” His preference for al-Assas was not unrelate to
this paper’s friendly attitude toward working-class activities:

It gives the correct news. And it happened that they published about
our strike in our factory in al-Misri, but it was not correct. But a -
published the strike in details. We made our strike because nine o
fellows were dismissed. Al-Misri did not mention this reason. Bu a-
mentioned this reason. Al-Assas is not afraid of the governmen
gives the correct news. (117)

On the same basis— that the radio ignored his factory s strike while
al-Assas covered it fully— he concluded that “the newspapers are
more important" than radio. The interviewer, struck by his c ass
consciousness on most issues, commented: “He is very enthusias c
and is always speaking about the workers and their strength a
their strikes.” ...

Many Workers nourish their sense of class consciousness wi
themes of class solidarity drawn from the media. Some deman
more such nourishment. One mechanic, when asked what he wo
do if he were editor of a newspaper, declared that he would P r0

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 233 )

mote unionization. He would "support all those who want the
true improvement of the working class, the trade union movement.”
(093) A shop worker, as editor, would "write supporting the in-
crease of payment for laborers and poor people." (110) A machinist
would, if manager of a radio station, shape its programs into a
Voice of the Workers:

I would increase the numbers of talks which is particularly about
laborers and their problems. I would suggest what treatment is neces-
sary to solve their problems. I would ask the capitalists to listen to the
complaints of laborers and then treat it accordingly; that is to decrease
the number of hours of daily work and their wages to be increased. I
would ask die government to ask the owners of factories to teach their
laborers arts of industry which they work without having some knowl-
edge about. (313)

This intense relationship to the media among the Workers is
rather special; its meaning is conveyed more fully when contrasted
with media behavior among the other groups. An important ques-
tion for radio behavior is, who owns the sets? The data show large
gaps between die groups: 80% of the Professionals and "White Col-
lars own sets, as compared with 30% of the Workers and 15% of
the Farmers. (As the sample was deliberately controlled to over-
represent radio-listeners, no extrapolation to the general population
is possible; these figures are useful only for comparing groups
within the sample.) Listening habits vary, of course, with radio
ownership. Over 80% in the two upper groups, owning their private
sets, usually listen at home. But 56% Workers and 65% Fanners go
elsewhere to listen— a friend’s home or, in most cases, a coffee-
house. One obvious result of this is that most Professionals (66%)
and White Collars (74%) plan their listening ahead; whereas few
of the Workers (29%) are able to do this. In view of this, the pro-
portion of regular listeners among the Workers is extremely high:
78% listen daily.

What do tiiey h'sten to? News reports rank high with all listeners.
Notably, it is most often the favorite program among Farmers—
chosen by 57% of listeners in this group, about 25% more than
among Professionals and Workers. This is doubtless related to the
inaccessibility of other news media among Farmers: illiteracy de-
prives diem of ready access to newspapers and magazines; news-
reds are extremely rare in their rural world. Another factor appears
to be the less inhibited pleasure which Fanners take in the highly

( 234 ) The Arab Worlds

emotive content of Egyptian news broadcasts. Egyptian St&
Broadcasting (E.S.B.) operates on the basis that news-witbcst-
views is a waste of radio time. All its newscasts are heavily charged
with vibrant opinions, calculated to keep nationalist sentiment fc
a continuous state of high excitation. Such programs are well liked
by Farmers and by White Collar respondents (47% of whom oil
news their favorite program), the groups whose nationalist senti-
ments, as we have seen, are uncomplicated by competing sym-
bolisms. The Professionals, involved in their complex ambivalence
toward the West, do not take unalloyed pleasure in E.S.B.’s shrill
campaigns to stimulate mass emotion. The Workers, with their
strong competing allegiance to the emergent symbols of claw-
conflict, are less interested in the univocal nationalism of E.S.B,

Other differences in program preferences are worth noting.
Interests and tastes are most varied among the Professionals, and
the range narrows steadily in each group down to the Farmers.
The latter approach unanimity in assigning top preference to a
single type of program— 89% prefer Koran readings to all other
broadcasts, as compared with 64% Worker, 38% White Collar, and
28% Professional listeners. The steady decrease is one neat indi-
cator of progressive secularization. It should be read together with
the finding, already reported, that none of the Workers attends
services at the mosque (while nearly all the Fanners do go daily).
The Workers, it appears, can take the Koran as ‘living literature
and leave it as theology.

Another relevant datum is awareness of foreign broadcasts. The
rule that international listening indexes transitionalism— specifically
from parochial toward cosmopolitan perspectives— is reconfirme
by the figures in Table 6, obtained when respondents were aske
to identify the foreign stations that can be heard in Egypt.

Table 6 — Awareness of Foreign Broadcasfs

Professional

While Collar

Workers

England (BBC)

94%

91%

42 %

Untied Stales

56

49

10

France and Monte Carlo

42

31

10

Arob League Countries

43

51

32

Cyprus (Near East)

38

43

28

Russia and Satellites

23

29

3

Don’t know

2

26

fc-ri'i

17 %

6

2

17

19

2

67

The BBC presence is widely felt among the respondents. Bu !

Egypt- The Vicious Circle ( 235 )

awareness of all Western broadcasts declines steadily as we move
down the status scale. Conversely, awareness of Middle East sta-
tions (Arab League and Cyprus) increases relatively as awareness
of the West declines. The most striking difference, of course, is
the proportion of ignorance in each group. As compared with vir-
tually complete information at the top, and preponderant awareness
nmong the Workers, two out of three Fanners are simply not
aware at all that a world network exists.

These distributions were confirmed by a subsequent "double
check” question, which asked respondents to identify foreign coun-
tries that broadcast in Arabic, and by a question about each re-
spondent’s own habits. Hie latter showed that over 70% of the
two upper groups listen to foreign broadcasts, as compared with
361? Workers and 17$ Farmers. The world-involved Professionals
also declare themselves to be quite regular foreign listeners: about
a third h'sten “almost every day” and another half “two to three
days a week.” They give the palm of preference to BBC, followed
by Cyprus— which is a "gray” British station, neither affirming nor
denying its British control but simply avoiding the question.

The differential impact of the media is further clarified by data
on the movies. The first question was who goes to the movies and
how often? Table 7 shows the answers.

Table 7 — Movie Attendance

Alltnd Movltti

Professional

While Cellar

Workers

farmers

One# or more o week

46%

50%

45%

9%

Once or twice a month

43

29

36

54

l*l« than four l!me» a year

11

21

19

37

100%

100%

100%

100%

Many of those Workers who have neither enough literacy to
read newspapers, nor enough cash to buy a radio, can get fairly
regular access to the movies. It is the Fanners who are most sharply
cut off from regular participation in the vast expansive universe
of tho movies. (We recall again that the sample was controlled to
over-represent media-participation; overall rural movie attendance
is much lower than in this particular sample. )

The world of movies, however, is not the same for all spec-
tators— and its impact involves more than frequency of exposure.
What types of films a person sees may matter more titan how often

( 236 ) The Arab Worlds

he sees them. When each respondent named the country whose
films he liked best, the interesting distribution in Table 8 was
obtained.

Table 8 — Nationality of Preferred Films

Prefer films

Produced hyi

Professional

While Collar

Workers

former!

United States

68%

76%

40%

15%

Great Britain

18

12

2

-

Egypt

20

21

60

85

Other

6

3

6

5

The upper groups express overwhelming preference for West-
ern products, to which the Farmers are relatively indifferent. The
converse applies on preference for Egyptian films, which draw
preponderant approval among the Farmers but only a minority
vote among the Uppers. The Workers, in die characteristic manner
of early Transitionals, were more evenly divided— with an e ge
of preference for the local product. It is doubtful that these
ferences can be ascribed to pure judgments of film technique.
What separates the groups, more likely, is their responsiveness o
the divergent contents of Western and local films. Many Farmers
and some Workers find in Egyptian movies a more familiar wor
of faces and landscapes, people and problems. They invaria y
contain a heavy freight of Traditional morality, and when oo
triumphs over Evil it does so in Koranic and easily compre ensi <
categories. ...

The Uppers are more profoundly involved with the modem E
ways exhibited in films from the West; the problems that grip e ’
interest, and die triumphs of virtue that satisfy their sense o ] u!
tice, occur in terms more remote from traditional Koranic preocci
pations. A nuance worth noting, in this connection, is that
distinction between British and American films is virtually co,
fined to the Uppers— and that preference for the British p r0 u
is most frequent among Professionals. These few people learne
state the problems of modem life in a British formulation, ai
they remain intensely responsive to the British dramatization
modem lifeways.

These differences in media behavior indicated discontinuit
of Egyptian sentiment which correspond to the class cleavages, i
Westernized sensibility of the elite differentiated them brusqui

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 237 )

from the mass of their compatriots. It also divided the elite in-
ternally and reduced its capacity for joint action. The disjunction
was sharpest at that point where, in a communication revolution,
reciprocity counts heavily— i.e., the relations between men of knowl-
edge and men of power. Social and economic trends in Egypt had
reinforced, over generations, the psychic gap.

In particular, the torment of desires that exceed capacities, while
new to tlic political section of Egypt's elite, had long been familiar
for the intelligentsia. Leadership in the search for an intellectual
accommodation of Islam to modernity was assumed by Egypt
long before it claimed the title to political premiership (which,
indeed, it has not yet firmly won). For generations it was distinc-
tively the Egyptian intellectual who sought a rationale of social
change appropriate to the Arab-Islam setting. The interior evolution
of their quest presents fascinating problems in the sociology of
knowledge that would repay close study. 10 As our present interest
centers upon the political function of intellectuals, we may sum-
marily note that die condition of an efficient elite— namely, good
working relations between those who know and those who decide
-had not been met. For one thing, on the judgment of leading
Islamists, the analytic quality of Egyptian social theory was rather
mediocre, hence its prescriptions tended to be superficial. 10 Ex-
positions of modernity ran to exhortation, and the defense of tra-
dition ran to apologetics. The programs they advocated were
derived mainly from the ambiguous implications of high doctrinal
controversy and tiieir instrumental value for the rulers was slight.

For anodier tiling, the vast overproduction of intellectuals had
debased honor without increasing influence. The proportion of
university graduates to total population, for example, was eleven
times greater in Egypt than in Britain. 17 This produced unem-
ployed intellectuals, almost invariably an index and agent of social
troubles. In 1937 jobless Baccalaureats were estimated at 7,500 and
unemployed graduates of Higher Schools at 3,500, The postwar
proportion of unemployment was even higher in a university pop-
ulation which had grown nearly ten times greater than it was two
decades ago. 18

This excess of university students creates a massive pressure
upon government jobs, for “the Arab who can read and write
resolutely refuses to work on the land. He insists on living in a
largo city— the capital if possible— and he seeks above all else a

f 238 ^ The Arab Worlds

job in a government office.'™ For status reasons, an JW» rt ,
any degree of education is likely to seek a public poTlbkm
duces a situation rather the reverse of what happens in a m X
society. Professor Berger writes:

When an Egyptian goes to the post office or police station or era
rairoad ticket office, he is almost certain to meet government officii
who earn more than he does and who are better educated. In the West
tile situation is more likely to be just the opposite. The mere fact that

c .T n r ,? ad and write P Iaces even lowliest clerk above the vast mas
or the illiterate population . 20

Even the swollen Egyptian bureaucracy cannot absorb the growing
population of new literates and literati. Secondary-school graduates
push for the lesser posts; college graduates find fewer openings,
Only a tiny proportion of 1948-1952 college graduates found gov-
ernment employment. (See Table 8.)

Table 9 — College Graduates in State Employment 21

Profession

1948-1952 Graduates

Slale-EmployeJ

Lawyers

2713

—

liberal Arts

1,895

278

Doctors

1,450

430

Polytechnicians

336

Pharmacists

2 77

120

Commerce

260

Agriculture

153

70

Dentists

50

33

Total

7,134

931

Those who did not get government jobs often found no gainful
work elsewhere. A striking example, in this agricultural economy,
e inability of even the relatively few agronomists to find non-
governmental employment. A careful postwar survey concluded;

At present the supply of technically trained advanced students of
agriculture exceeds the demands for their services on big agri-
cultural projects or in agricultural companies.” 22 So potent is the
prestige attached to a university degree among the literate that
many thousands prefer to expend the time, money, effort-and en-
aure the subsequent deprivations of unemployment and under-
empioyment-rather than settle for the free technical education
schnn ^ Ministry of Education in over a dozen specialized
espite the waiver of military service and other induce-

Egypt: The Vicious Circle { 239 )

merits, attendance at those free technical schools has lagged
relative to university 'growth. Their total enrollment was 5,449 in
tire year ending 1934; 7,905 in 1946; and 9,658 in 1952. 23

Here, again, the middle range of technical aspiration and achieve-
ment remains undermanned while die nonproductive bulge swells
toward the upper limits of professional status. Table 10 shows the
rate of increase, in die decade preceding our Egyptian survey,
among the occupations we classified as professional

Table 70 — Growth of Professional Class 24

1937

1947

Increase

Men of religion

51,000

52,400

2.7%

Schoolteacher*

35,300

52,000

47.3

Engineer*

8,400

15,800

88.1

Phytlciant and Oentitl*

3700

6,300

70.3

lawyer*

3,400

4700

38.2

Chemilt* and Phormaci*!*

1,200

1,600

33.3

Writer* and Journairjl*

1,200

8,200

583.3

Within the pattern of overall increase, the sharpest contrast is
between the two main occupations which initiate ideas and diffuse
symbols-thc “men of religion” show the lowest rate of increase,
whereas the rate is highest among the "writers and journalists.’’
Linked widi the latter is die substantial increase of teachers, a
process which has accelerated with the recent fivefold increase in
Normal school enrollment; from 3,875 in 1940 to 19,961 in 1952.
The postwar teaching corps has been increased, too, by the re-
cruitment of engineers and others unable to find work in their
professions. 25 The traditional founts of sacred symbolism are being
overtaken by the newer disseminators of secular knowledge, but
die modernizers have fewer places to go in the larger society.

Here is a root of the dilemma which confronts the Egyptian
intelligentsia. Oriented toward secular modernity, they find them-
selves tom by the imposed need to define Egypt’s course in terms
acceptable to traditional Islam. Tins produces aggrieved defensive-
ness and nmbivalence, which, by engaging the self in indecisive de-
bates and inconsistent decisions, reduces their efficiency. Ambiva-
lence is the more disorienting where political identity is struggling
to attain precedence among die secondary symbols of self-reference
(c.g., race and religion). As Nation is a key symbol in the political
array, ambivalent nationalism tends to produce indecisiveness or

1

( 240 ) The Arab Worlds

a spurious show of conviction at the level of top policy. %
showed throughout the 1951 interviews with Professionals. TW?
was little consensus on what to do or who should do it, hut instead
a striking lack of self-confidence and self-reliance. They looH
outward for help— often to the same Western world against which
on other grounds, they invoked the routine slogans of petals
self-indulgence.

The lack of a self -starting intelligentsia, providing the initiative
needed by all vigorous new nationalisms, was a severe handicap
to Nasser. In particular, the direction of Egyptian mass medial
to be entrusted to loyal members of the junta rather than men with
professional skills and experience. This complicated the problem
of public communication for the junta in rather profound ways,
The record of their first three years is an important chapter in the
evolution of public communication in the Middle East.

4. Politics and Psyche in The Vicious Circle

Political leadership in any society needs a base in some social
class, from which it can recruit its cadres. The modem West e$
tablished a base in the mobile, continuously self-reconstituting
middle classes. The military junta in Egypt has sought to creae
some such base rapidly. The Western model has not been easi 6
so far, but neither has the Soviet model. Proletarian democracy is
hardly viable in a society lacking a proletariat: the Wor ers m
Egyptian sample bear the marks of genuine proletarians, u
are few in number. Nor is agrarian democracy: the impovens
illiterate fellahin take more strength from the leadership an
can give and each effort to align this inert mass for politic ac
is fraught with great risks. This is another version of asse
“crisis of the millstones.” Every leadership seeking to mo e
a traditional society rapidly faces this dilemma— in Egypt e
tance between the horns is widened by the extraordinary S a P
tween pretension and performance, between claims and capaci
This gap led the Egyptian intelligentsia into extremist 3
and concealments which suggest, in Professor E, A. Speiser s P a ’
the nervousness of one whistling in the dark.” 20 Uncertainty
to their identity, their function, their future obscured clear vlS1 °
of themselves in the future world and increased their remote 11
from the Egyptian masses. Their ambivalence foreshadowed

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 241 )

'.'zigzag course of Egyptian policy since the military’ coup of July
?23 1952. Wien the original interviews were made, die Free Of-
ficers (Zvbat al-Ahrar) were a clandestine organization of quite
! junior officers who mainly produced some muted echoes of the
! nationalist clamor. Now they rule Egypt as the Revolutionary Com-
mand Council (R.C.C.). They have brought Egypt's problems to
a dramatic focus at the center of the world arena. But their course
has been erratic, their goal remains undefined, and their future path
obscure.

The junta’s course has been zigzag largely because die difficul-
ties of modernizing Egypt are real; perhaps no other Arab land
represents quite so unfavorable a net ratio of population to resources.
But they lacked clarity on an important question that preceded any
program: which set of problems ought to have priority— their own
need for a stable elite to bolster dieir national leadership, or rapid
movement toward die Good Society promised as the fruit of inde-
pendence? Before dieir revolution, the junta had perceived national
independence and social justice as reciprocal functions. Once in
power, dicy learned that die two were badly out of phase. Their
attention fluctuated from one to the other, and their policies were
improvised responses to unavoidable pressures.

The shifts in die junta’s policy are exhibited in the autobio-
graphical accounts published by their two successive chiefs— Gen-
eral Naguib and Colonel Nasser. These leaders, like their contem-
poraries, acquired early familiarity with the conflicts experienced
by persons who observe tlieir ancient world being flooded with
new and impotent dasires. Nasser writes of his school years:

Waves of thoughts and ideas came over us while we were not yet
developed enough to evaluate them. We were still living mentally in
the captivity of the 13th century'. . . . Our minds tried to catch up with
the caravan of human progress, although we were five centuries or more
behind. The pace was fearful and the journey was exhausting. 27

The goal was modernity on die Western model, designed in Britain.
Tliis shaped the junta’s quest for a usable political identity in the
early phase. But it assumed an inevitable correlation between the
national and social revolutions. The Egyptian nation was to find
itself by driving the foreigner out and bringing the good life in.
The equation was simultaneous. Nationalism meant a free and
equal homeland— free of die British and equal for the Egyptians.

Hence, their focus of attention was domestic. Events outside

( 2d 2 ) The Arab Worlds

Egypt seemed unreal; only the homeland was vivid and present
Even the 1948 war against Israel bears, in Nasser’s account, fig
extraordinary title: “Egypt Was the Center of Our Breams,” \t
begins with this remarkable sentence, considering Israels csrt&t
role as devil in Egyptian imagery: “When I now try to recall the
details of our experience in Palestine, I find a curious thing: w
were fighting in Palestine, but our dreams were centered in
Egypt.” (p. 21)

The junta, in that early phase, conceived their revolutionary
role in Robin Hood terms. Armed with the long bow of primitive
Marxism, they would equalize the homeland by taking from fire
rich and giving to the poor. But they soon learned that their brave
new land reform, while high-minded, was conceived in innocence,
With a maximum of one million acres for potential development,
of which but 5,000 acres are actually under cultivation, such an
enterprise as die Liberation ( Tohrir ) Province is notable mainly
for its heuristic intent. Dr. Warriner, a sympathetic expert, con-
cluded: “No reform, even if it went much further than the present
measure, could provide land for all in this congested country, or
could increase employment in agriculture.” 28

As the staggering burden of real needs was borne in on them,
the R.C.C. began to feel oppressed by their slow progress an
sought other solutions elsewhere. The focus of effort shifted rom
home economics to world politics, and the junta acquired a nen
official vision of the future. This entailed a reallocation of ideologies
priorities and the communication revolution in Egypt took a new
turn. The historic shift, personified by the two main actors in e
drama, can be summarized in three phases: Naguib primacy, tran
sition, Nasser control.

Phase 1: The Naguib Technique-Vox Populi. The issue between
Naguib and Nasser turned, indeed, upon the process which is e
theme of this chapter— the use of public communication as an m
strument of social change. The conflict is dramatized in their re-
spective autobiographical reflections on die revolution. Nagw
summarized the case thus:

I shall not enumerate my specific differences with the Council er •
It is enough, I think, for me to say that most of them revolved alC ®"
what Abd el Nasser has called the “philosophy” of the revolution-
haps, since neither of us are philosophers, it would be better to ca
the “psychology” of the revolution. Abd el Nasser believed, with all

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 243 )

bravado of a man of thirty-six, that we could afford to alienate every
j-cincnt of Egyptian public opinion, if necessary, in order to achieve
our coals. I believed, with all the prudence of a man of fifty-three, that
we would need as much popular support as we could possibly retain.
It remains for the course of history to determine which of us was

right P

Naguib hinged the long-term success of the revolution, from the
start, to popular acceptance. In these terms he explains why the
junior officers sought his leaderslup before attempting the coup:

I was known to every man in the Army and could count on its
support; my reputation was above reproach; and my personality was
such as to appeal to the Egyptian people, (p. 33)

It was his function to win them "the popular following necessary
to succeed." (p. 14)

The management of public communication can be decisive
for the style of modem governance. Naguib and Nasser disagreed,
fundamentally, on who constituted the relevant public and what
was the proper scope of their participation.

Naguib Nasser

I did my best to make it a per-
suasive rather than a coercive dic-
tatorship. ... I travelled through-
out the country' listening patiently
to everyone’s complaints. I en-
couraged people to petition the
Government to redress their griev-
ances and I personally saw to it
tlint thousands of grievances were
redressed. 1 spoke to die people in
their own language, and in my
speeches, most of which were ex-
temporaneous, I confined myself to
the use of simple phrases and ex-
pressions that they could under-
stand. That no attempt has yet
been made on my life, I think, is
proof that my approach to the
Egyptian people was correct, (pp.
191-192)

We were deluged with petitions
and complaints by the thousand and
hundreds of thousands. . . . There
was a confirmed individual egotism.
The word “I” was on every tongue.
... I realized that [our task] would
be accomplished at the expense of
popularity. We had to be blunt,
outspoken, armed with reason
whenever we addressed the people.
Our predecessors were skilled in
deluding people and telling them
what they liked to hear. How easy
it is to appeal to people’s emotions
and how difficult to appeal to their
reason. . . . We could have smoth-
ered the public with resounding
words compounded of delusion and
fancy. . . . But was this the mission
with which Fate had entrusted us?
<pp. 33, 36, 72-73)

A governing body cannot long endure with its public face
chronically divided between a smile and a scowl. Naguib was

(244) The Arab Worlds

ti.e junta to restore him. But the differene« w™ pl-ff
eas y reconciled, and the restoration was short-lived Again NaM

fcsue e tr d h Na r r a t a ”i ed 7116 ° ffidai kcc - ita*5

Mainr ? lT e ^ r0adcast by * e Master Of Natioaal Gnii*.
Major Salah Salem, on February 26, 1954, over E.S.B. This in
reveahng document on the use of mass media, Dealing a* fc

psychological crises from which Naguib continued to snfer.-fc
statement said: '

in ordpr^tn assamed the P°* of Director of the E.S.B. in October to
Presidenf reor S a j 1Iz e it I had to face tragedies every day. For the
orderc in ' ' to contact E.S.B. officials ... to give them died
newc h„u , r . e P eafc ^ roa dcasts of his speeches several times. Even tie
hpfnrrs h ° m cou lf not 3e broadcast before it was checked by him and
e personally recorded his contacts, visits and meetings,

rj.-y .,. .r Nubia he used to give direct orders to the Deputy

to rpr,p.,f°fi, 16 anc * ot b er officials to change the programmes ad

that rtio ^Pocches delivered by him there several times, so much so
thpir rir7^ U , C bad become disgusted and abstained from switching on
thp f G S . 1S . was oootradictory to the orders issued by me to

cranimw- «° se j c b° ns * n the E.S.B. not to make any changes in the pro-
to h?‘m ft. f C fi? 111 certain ser ious cases. These chiefs often complained
Two cpnin! , WC r e at a ^ oss as t0 which order they should obey,
the enm-pn ° Cia S c ° E.S.B. had to feign illness in order to avoid
tiie consequences °f such contradictory orders.

camnaicm tv . 1 * 1 r ® c ® m b er l ast when I was facing the Sudanese election
contradietorv ^ j 6 £ near a n . ervous breakdown as a result of Naguib’s
who failed tn * &TS { r0m -^ubia and his insistence on punishing officials
could not nnv^h) V \^ iem ? ut to t b e letter, although most of such orders
I rememhJ f carne< ^ out for material and technical reasons,
repeat tS uT e ? am P le > on the Prophets Birthday he asked me to
30 minutes and °J one lasted for 76 minutes, the second

had to broadcast thoV^^^u , rn | n ] ltes - T bis was the day on which we
of his broadcasts to kp° Pet ? birthday celebrations. I gave orders for too
however the rw, lH ® postponed to the next day. The same evening,
General Naguib °f, die E.S.B. received a telegram from

his orders. in ® P uni " s bment of those who had not obeyed

to tell my comraTJf ^ 1S state °f a Sairs no longer and went along

asked me toTeen “ T RevoIu «onary Council all about them. They
my problems I Lf.LT " 8 \° improve th e E.S.B. As this did not solve
hed up by going along to the Military jail at Bab

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 245 )

al-HadJd and asking for a cell where my friends found me in the evening
md called on me to stand up to tire situation. , xT .. ,

As I had control of the press, I recall too that General Naguib used
to send delegates to the newspapers and aslc them to publish photo*
graphs, statements and special articles. Any editor, reporter or official
can confirm my statement.

Very often I was obliged to censor certain of his statements winch
contradicted decisions taken by die Revolutionary Council. One day I
had to suppress the title of an article which he sent to al-Ahram for
publication on die front page. This was an article by John Gundier en-
titled 'The Smiling Dictator of Egypt."

He telephoned me and insisted that tin's tide appear. I tried in vain
to dissuade him as we could not permit a newspaper to call Naguib
a dictator at die very moment that Churchill was making the same charge
in the Commons. He refused and I had to ask the Editor-in-Chief of
oI-A/iram to publish the article as it had been sent by General Naguib.

I defy any Editor or reporter to mention any one member of the
Revolutionary Council who has asked for his photograph or a special
article to be published.

The chief editor of al-Ahram even got into touch with the Chief
Censor and said that he could not as a patriot publish a statement
that Naguib was a dictator. I told him to do as he was ordered by the
President. . . .

You ask why we made him into a symbol of confidence and to
this I reply that we never unshed to create symbols as in the olden days.
No member of the Revolutionary Council is permitted to praise any
of his colleagues. Some of them were even angry with me when they
were praised in die press. Personally I am convinced that the public
was wrong, for it should never place all its hopes in any one person,
but should concentrate on principles only. 30

Phase 2: Transition— What Price Persuasion? Nasser and his
youthful colleagues were deeply shaken by the implications of
Naguibs bid for mass popularity. In words begin responsibilities;
a communication network implies a power structure. The demo-
cratic use of power requires communication from below as well
as from above. Discussion and decision tend, in a participant society,
to implicate each other. It is unnecessary to persuade those whose
views can be assumed or ignored; it can be fatal to ignore or
coerce those whose consent must be gained. Naguib’s courtship of
ie nor papuli implied a politics of mass participation which seemed
dangerous to the R.C.C. To Nasser, the masses that had “come in
aidless droves" through the revolutionary breach already appeared
dark and ominous.”

Nasser preferred tire military image of an orderly “advance” led

( 246 } The Arab Worlds

by a vanguard and followed by masses that would “fall in J/vC: j
in serried ranks,” The principle of a “smiling dictatorship’ v„
more risky than the impersonal politics of a proper "chain of or?
mand.” The Egyptian masses were not “ready” for mass partkrs-
tion, hence a politics of persuasion was premature. Nassefs actca
of his disillusionment by the Egyptian mass is candid:

Before July 23rd, I had imagined that the whole nation wa$ nf-
and prepared, waiting for nothing but a vanguard to lead the dcr: j
against the battlements, whereupon it would fall in behind in ««*>!
ranks, ready for the sacred advance towards the great objective, . , .
but how different is the reality from the dream! The masses tint
were disunited, divided groups of stragglers. The sacred advancer-:
stalled, and the picture that emerged on that day looked dark t%
ominous; it boded danger. ... We were not yet ready. So we set shat
seeking the views of leaders of opinion and the experience of those
were experienced. Unfortunately we were not able to obtain vrj
much. (pp. 32-34)

In turning from the mass to seek “the views of leaders of opiffixt
the R.C.C. shifted its priority to the formation of a usable elite. I
good military fashion, they sought to recruit tire cadres »
could then train the line regiments. Their task was to create a
coalition out of aggressive elements in the old elite and the no .-
group of Transitionals. They turned first to the radical intelledM
—the symbol-manipulators who can give direction to the fonv--
movement of a revolutionary program. Since the orthodox into-
gentsia often will not or cannot fill this role, revolutionarj
ship usually turns to the secular intellectuals located at more ^
bile” positions in the universities or mass media. But we have so-
how ambivalent the secular intelligentsia of Egypt had beccc-
and the literature of political sociolog)' suggests how treacreax
their political alliances in any country can be. 31 Nasser exp
enced the symptoms at first hand:

I remember visiting once one of our universities where I w
professors together and sat with them in order to benefit bom «
scholastic experience. Many of them spoke before me and r , .
length. It was unfortunate that none of them advanced any •
stead, each confined himself to advancing himself to me, poinm.^
his unique fitness for making miracles. Each of them kept
me with the look of one who preferred me to all the treasures °
and heaven, (p. 37)

llis sense of deception by the fawning professors was matches

Egypti The Vicious Circle ( 247 )

other elite circles, among which he singles out for special mention
"large landholders . . . the politicians of the old regime . . . many
government officials/’ (pp. 74-75) This deprived him of any solid
base among the existing elites of enlightenment, wealth and power.
So Nasser came to the crucial decision that, faced with masses
whose deeds could be "dark and ominous” and without an efficient
elite to count on, his mission “would be accomplished at the ex-
pense of popularity.”

Small wonder, then, that Nasser, a Puritanical man with exact-
ing moral standards, should have formed his Revolutionary Com-
mand Council exclusively with fellow Army officers of equal dedi-
cation:

The situation demanded the existence of a force set in one cohesive
framework, far removed from the conflict between individuals and
classes, and drawn from the heart of the people: a force composed of
men able to trust each other; a force with enough material strength at
its disposal to guarantee a swift and decisive action. These conditions
cotild he met only by the Army. (p. 42)

But a scowling dictatorship is not necessarily more efficient, and
is probably less durable, than a smiling dictatorship. To run a
revolution takes more than an austere mien; and other than mili-
tary perspectives are needed to rim a civil society. Atatiirk had
symbolized tin’s by changing his public portrait from military uni-
form to white tie and tails. More recent military coups d'etat
in the Arab area— the prewar seven in Iraq (1936-1941) and the
postwar four in Syria (1949-1952)— have also shown that recruit-
ment from a broader social base soon becomes essential. Professor
Majid Kbadduri, keen student of the military role, suggests why;

At best the reform program of the military was eclectic; it included
various ideas and proposals that had become popular among the people,
but these were never integrated or worked out by speciafists as to the
ways and means of carryring them out. Thus in Egypt, the army has
been advocating land reform by limiting landownership to a legal maxi-
mum of 200 acres and encouraging small holdings; hut in advocating
this appealing program, which has become very popular among the
masses, the military’ do not seem to realize that improving the economic
condition of the nation would be dependent on new means of increasing
agricultural production for an already overpopulated country rather
than on redistributing the land among a larger number of people. 32

of

Confronted with apparently insuperable short-term problems
social organization and economic development at borne, Nasser

( 248 ) The Arab Worlds

overleaped them to stake the Egyptian future upon his s"k2i t
long-term play in the world political game. He shifted public Na-
tion from land-reform to Czechoslovak arms and Suez tolls. Thae-
after, he no longer detailed the program for an Egypt of socM
justice but sketched the portrait for an Egypt of surpassing greatness. ,
Naguib had chosen, for the closing theme of his book, this sen-
tence:

The revolt of the Arab peoples, after all, is but a belated refeefe
of the revolt of the Western peoples that began with the revolutions
the United States and France. . . . the sort of federation that I caus i
would begin like Benelux and end like Switzerland, (pp. 273, 262)

For Nasser this has become a parochial view of the Egyptian
future. In his current aspirations, Egypt figures as the patron spin)
of a nascent Africa, as the vital center of an Arab circle, as t
prime ministry of an Islamic World Parliament. His vision ^ '
wandered far from the homeland. As his sketch of the Egyp™
future closes, Nassers new reveries are playing political ari unete

with

the 80 million Muslims in Indonesia, and the 50 million in China, ^
the millions in Malaya, Siam, and Burma, and the nearly .

in the Middle East, and the 40 million in the Soviet Union, °8® ,

the other millions in far-flung parts of the world— when I con
hundreds of millions united by a single creed, I emerge wi
of the tremendous possibilities which we might realize t roug
operation of all these Muslims, (p. 113)

What had happened to Nasser? .

Phase 3: The Nasser Syndrome. The shift from home emo
to global imperialism appears at first to be an aberration,
sort of talk from a man of modest mien does not seem sen ^
For the Muslim millions of the world are no more uni e
single creed” than, say, the Catholics of Mongolia and the
of Mississippi. But there is psychic meaning in politica visi
even when aberrant. . ,- ve

Nasser has gone the way of total politization— the dis nc ^
mark of totalitarianism in our century. Wielding inadequate po\
to enact rapidly their grand designs, such leaders have yo e
values to their quest for more power. Nasser has perceive 1
the “dark and ominous” mass, which so depressed him w _ !Cfl ^
had to be served, can be made to serve him— and through mm, ^
runs the rationale, ultimately serve its own “higher ends. u

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 249 )

thinking has come to seem a viable political strategy in the era of
mass communications. Now it appears feasible to shape mass emo-
tion to a large political purpose. Nassers n£w communication
Strategy shows in the burst of activity given, under his guidance,
to die "Voice of the Arabs” and to the “Arab News Agency.” Also
in his new readiness to exploit, politically, the pieties of the pil-
grimage to Mecca:

Journalists of the world should hasten to cover the Pilgrimage, not
because it is a traditional ritual affording interesting reports for the
reading public, but because of its function as a periodic pob'tical con-
ference in which the envoys of the Islamic states ... lay down in this
Islamic world-parliament the broad lines of their national policies and
tbcfr pledges of mutual cooperation from one year to another, (p. 112)

Utter politization underlies such efforts to fuse modem parlia-
mentarianism with the ancient theocracy of Islam in a global
fantasy. It suggests why a once austere leader, contemptuous of
public opinion, is beguiled by chimera that wall attract the “journal-
ists of the world." More than political calculation is at work here.
The naive candor of Nasser’s "philosophy” stems from the convic-
tion that his vision is clever— and righteous. He seems, at times, to
be still fighting the battle of his youth: *to show the hated imperial-
ist from the West that he is just as strong and much more virtuous
than his conqueror. He writes:

Sometimes when I re-read the pages of our history, I feel a tearing
grief . . . we were the victims of a tyrannous feudalism which did noth-
ing for us except suck the lifeblood from our veins. Nay, even worse—
it robbed us of all sense of strength and honor. It left in the depths of
our souls a complex which we will have to fight for a long time to
overcome, (p. 63)

This is the sense of shame before their conquerors which has
scarred die Egyptian leaders and marred their conception of right
role and proper place. Naguib, a simpler person than Nasser, speaks
of the same "complex” somewhat more bluntly:

I was ashamed of the low esteem in which Egyptians were held by
Britons and other foreigners, and I was determined to show our cynical
rulers that something could and would be done about it. (pp. 19-20)

These statements explicate the feelings so widespread among the
intelligentsia interviewed in 1951 — viz., the schoolteacher who, al-
though he believed “England is the greatest country,” would never-

( 250 ) The Arab Worlds

thelcss “feel ashamed [to live there] because they would looH
me as a master looks at his slave.”

The difference is that Nasser makes Egyptian policy, and jjg |
year is 1958. The battle for independence is done and won Th
British Empire is gone— from Cairo, from Suez, and now even fro
tlie Sudan. To persist in shaping the world to the amfefe
imagery of youth, among ex-colonials as among ex-imperialists,
may in the long run serve pathology better than policy. Seel®’ |
to compensate the fantasy life for damages inflicted in a no longs
relevant past obscures the lines to a realistic political future. Ik
new Constitution, announced by Nasser on January 16, 1956, docu-
ments the excesses of ambivalent nationalism. It proclaims Egypt
to be an Islamic and Arab state under a republican and democratic
form of government. But this combination of all desirable i ehte
is, at die moment, sheer fantasy. To proclaim Egypt a emocra c
republic ignores, but does not alter, the fact that it h a “jf
dictatorship. To proclaim Egypt formally an Arab nation { or e
first time in history) leaves unaltered the fact that Egyp ansar
ethnically not Arabs. To proclaim that the Arab nation r\
“extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gu over
current reality in order to prophesy a massive rearrangemen

the present facts of life. i u

Whether this is “rational prophecy,” of the sort escn
Max Weber, remains to be seen. But we shall he better prc ^ _
for observation by understanding the psychopolitical mo e
the “Nasser syndrome” seeks to diffuse. Ambivalence is s
recurrent theme in the unfinished script of the Egyptian ‘ ^
But release through aggression is the approved new P° stur ® ,. • -
by Colonel Nasser. His role on the world stage provides t e
model to his countrymen. Only optimists in the West interpr
seizure of Suez, for example, in such petty terms as cana
The press and radio of Egypt, as indeed of all Arab fan s, ^
brate a more basic meaning— exalting the Self by humilia iog^
West. Nasser is aware, however, that avenging past mgi
can become a dangerous self-indulgence. Hence he spea so.

the crisis of the millstones— a revolution which obliges us to ^
in one phalanx and forget the past , and another revolution w 1
mands that we restore lost dignity to our moral values by not jo g ^
the past, . . . One revolution makes it obligatory that we uni ^
love one another; the other brings dissension upon us against o
sires, causing us to hate each other, (pp. 44, 41)

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 251 )

Ambivalent affect and erratic policy will continue, probably,
until Egyptians agree to do one effectively-to forget or not forget,
to love or hate— instead of struggling to do both simultaneously.
Meanwhile, Nasser has accepted total engagement with the "dark
and ominous” mass and has undertaken to cope with the heavy
emotional requirements of mass communication. Now, no longer
hesitant to acknowledge his dictatorship, he often smiles in public.

5 . Whither the Communication Revolution?

Nasser, then, has converted liis earlier view that Egyptian society
was not "ready” for mass participation into a more daring hypoth-
esis-that he can use the mass media to achieve national consensus
without unduly raising public demands for full participation. This
feat lunges upon effective control of the media, along with all
other channels of access to the Egyptian mass. He has not unlimited
freedom of action, but moves within what he has called "the scope
of our necessities.” As empirical limits, three aspects of the current
communication network merit special attention: (1) the dispro-
portionate growth of "production” over “consumption” in the mass
media; (2) the erratic penetration of the media beyond the urban
elite sector; (3) the counteractive effects among the mass popula-
tion of messages diffused through traditional oral networks by
non-Nasser sources.

We noted earlier the extraordinary increase of “writers and
journalists” recorded in the Egyptian census during 1937-1947.
Even when treated with the prudence required by all Egyptian
statistics, the trend is clear and has continued. It has not been
paralleled by the expansion of media participation. The surplus of
producers over consumers is great and growing, as indexed by the
wiespread unemployment or foreign employment among “symbol
specialists”

The national capacity to consume mediated messages is de-
tennined by three attributes of the potential audience: residence
cash, literacy. The initial obstacle is sheer physical access-wheri
people.live, m a transport-poor land, usually determines whethei
they arc reached at all by media products. When overcome, the
question of economic access arises. The mass media usually prospei

?;3 ere a k®* of People have at least small amount!

1 surplus cash-enough left over from the requirements of dailj

( 252 ) The Arab Worlds

bread to buy a newspaper, a cinema ticket, a radio. We haves©
that these conditions for growth of a mass audience are poor
relatively worsening in Egypt. But even a spectacular growl d
cash customers in town and country would not be enough. For fe
third precondition— which may be called psychocultural access-
must also be met.

The tool that provides psychocultural access to the media is
literacy. In 1950 ( the year to which most of our media data reia)
a UNESCO report estimated the Egyptian population over sera
years old to be 90$ illiterate; in 1956, on a more favorable basis
for estimation, the proportion was still about 82$ illiterate. 33 Despite
ambitious plans, the development of free elementary schools has
not been paced to the growing needs, as Issawi points out, partly
for fear of aggravating the rural exodus. 34 Those with physical access
and surplus cash, but not a usable literacy, tend to remain outside
the media network. Conversely, those with literacy, even w ea
living in rural poverty, exert themselves to gain access. The new
literates constitute the corps of restless Transitionals that may
remake Egypt and the Middle East in the next decades. Literacy
is their tool, mobility their method and the participant lire ®
goal.

For while literacy as a tool equips people only to consume
print, in the deeper sense acquisition of literacy transforms a per
son. He acquires some of that capacity to move from partic a
to general, from concrete to abstract, which is standard in mo
communications. Mastery of the logical conventions of gram®
and syntax, which print imposes upon routinely-acquired s P et ^ '
is a long step in this direction. Thus, the illiterate Lebanese
lager who found even “listening to things read” on the ra o
cult, and preferred “being told ” in the colloquial narrative o
oral tradition. An illiterate Egyptian villager explained w y ^
learns less even from radio and movies than those who can rea ■
“They see something I do not see, know about many things
not know. [What things?} More about the world.” (104) lS
why literacy usually increases consumption of all media, fh e cen
tripetal tendency we have observed in all lands. While literacy
is essential only for print, everywhere it correlates highly wi
exposure to other media as well. The newspaper-readers ten o
he also the radio-listeners and the movie-goers. How, faced wi
an illiterate population, have the Egyptian media fared?

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 253 )

Tlie output of printed matter seems large, but collation of
relevant figures corrects the impression of a thriving industry.
UNESCO reported that in 1950 there were 55 daily and approxi-
mately 200 weekly newspapers in production. But only 26 dailies
K-ere in Arabic, the majority serving foreigners. Oyer half were
published in Cairo, 20 in Alexandria, and die remainder in three
govemorates. No daily newspaper was produced in all of Egypt
outside these five capital cities. Moreover, total circulation was
only 350,000 copies, averaging 17 copies daily per thousand inhabi-
tants as compared with 624 in Britain. 85 The difference between
production and consumption of books was even more striking,
rwenty publishing houses produced about 500 books per year;
but “unsold books pile up and inactive stocks impede the devel-
opment of publishing." There were only 2% million books in all
Egyptian libraries combined— about half of the number in the
New York Public Library alone. 80

The situation was similar in the other media. Radio has been,
tincc 1947, a government operation called Egyptian State Broad-
casting (under the Ministry of Social Affairs). Equipped with five
medium-wave and one 10 KW transmitters, E.S.B. had a total
transmitting power of 81.1 KW. But there were only 288,000 li-
censed radio receivers in all of Egypt, averaging 12 per thousand
inhabitants as compared with 610 in the United States. Similarly,
10 film companies produced 40-50 feature films each year, but
the annual paid attendance of 42 million averaged about 2 attend-
ances per capita as compared with 22 in the United States. 87

Media consumption was not only inadequate relative to pro-
duction but sliarply skewed relative to population sectors. Mainly
ronfined to the great cities, the distribution of radio sets is shown
in Table 11. Cairo had almost half of all the radio sets in the country,
Alexandria had more sets than all the rest of Lower Egypt, and the

Arta

Cciro

AIt*ontJrIa

lowtf Egypl
Upfxr Egypt

Total

Table 11 — Radio Ownership (1951) ss

P«rmils

103,322

55,404

56,622

18782

234,130

Contraventions*

24.000

15.000
10,500

4,800
54,300

Total

127,322

70,404

67,122

23,582

288,430

11 Con ~ io "‘ «•

( 254 ) The Arab Worlds

vast rural expanse of Upper Egypt averaged but three sets pa
thousand people. Consumption of print and film was equity
concentrated in the great urban centers, As compared with &
urban cinemas seating about 200,000, there were but 28 uobfe
units in die rural areas and their annual attendance averaged out
to one film per year for every three persons > 39

Under the regime of Nasser there has been substantial media
growth shown by UNESCO figures for 1950 and 1956 in Table li

Table 12 — Growth of Media Consumption 40

1950

Total Daily Circulation 350,000

Total Licensed Receivers 238,000

Total Cinema Attendance 42,000,000

1956

500,000

405,000

86,000,000

Radio and film have grown most. With slow reduction of Mm,
new recruits have gained access mainly througi nonpnn
media. Press circulation also increased, but not— w en mcr
sales among non-Egyptians (e.g., Palestinian refugees) are c
puted— in proportion to the growth of literate pop a lon -

The press, too, has been rigidly homogenized. Formerly co
mopolitan and free-wheeling, newspaper output has een
under central directive. The foreign press, under asser, ' ...

(even before Suez) to one-fourth its former size—
from 13 to five, Greek dailies from seven to two, while
Armenian and two English dailies have disappeare . e
new daily is al-Goumhouria , published directly un er t re a
of Nasser’s Liberation Rally. The Arab News Agency, o
controlled by the Hulton Press Organization in Lon on,
come a supplementary voice of Cairo throughout the ft 1 e
Recent media growth, then, reflects mainly the increase 3
tions of Cairo as a message center in the world networ .
development has gone the way of general development P r0 i e ^
After a brave start toward building home audiences, e ^
were diverted to adventures abroad in support of the new g ° 3
of Egyptian policy. The E.S.B. transmitters, which still reac on
a fraction of their potential audience at home, nevertheless 13 ^
been so deployed as to blanket the Middle East. The programm^o
schedule gives top priority to its role as spokesman for tire r

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 255 )

Muslim areas. E.S.B. now broadcasts in French, English, Greek,
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Turb'sh, Persian, Urdu, In-
donesian and Swahili. 41

A major instrument of Cairo’s drive for political leadership is
ES.B.s Voice of the Arabs (Saut al-Arab), which broadcasts over
short and medium wave five hours daily in a modem form of liter-
ary Arabic that am be heard from Algeria to Uganda, from Iraq
to* the remote shaykhdoms at the southern tip of Arabia. In these
broadcasts away from the homeland, E.S.B. lets itself go. Despite
Nasser’s public remorse over domestic blood-letting, the Voice of
tiie Arabs became a major relay in the chain-reaction of assassina-
tion and mob violence tlirough the area. So blatant were its calls
for murder in North Africa, and so weighty the evidence that tied
E.S.B. to a secret espionage and terrorist apparatus, that the Quai
d'Orsay followed many futile protests by restricting French ex-
ports of military materiel to Egypt Subsequently, the Voice of
the Arabs received major credit for inciting the riots which top-
pled two governments and prevented Jordan’s adherence to the
Baghdad Pact (MEDO). The New York Times dispatch on these
events stated:

Jordanian and Western observers alike noted one outstanding thing
about these riots: they broke out almost simultaneously in towns and
Milages throughout a country where roads and communications are most
primitive. Political leaders in 'Amman and Jerusalem said they had no
contact with people of remote sections of the country, but that those
people had been listening to the Voice of the Arabs’ reports about dem-
onstrations in the capital and had followed suit. 42

Outside the Arab area, E.S.B. articulates the reveries of a
Cairo-centered world sketched in Nasser’s “philosophy of the revo-
lution.” In Urdu, official language of Pakistan, and in Indonesian
it resonates his theme of Islamic World Power. In Swahili (E.S.B.
now broadcasts in more African languages than BBC) it propa-
gates, with the tongue of many million Africans, Nasser’s plan for
an Egypt-centered continent. Thus, on October 13, 1955:

Die Mau Mau revolt, in which white arms defeated black courage,
must be revived, not only in Kenya but in the entire continent and must
go on until Africa belongs to the Africans. 43

The highly differentiated operations of E.S.B. abroad are de-
scribed by the psychological warfare specialist Edmond Taylor.
In its broadcasts to Ethiopia:

( 256 ) The Arab Worlds

Radio Cairo has adopted at least four different propaganda
various Moslem enclaves within Ethiopia, whose dominant class Z
prising about one-half of the population, is Coptic Christian. To okfe
returned to Ethiopia by Britain in 1955, Cairo broadcasts that the Bridi
sold the region out to the Ethiopians (it had always been part of Ethiopia
until the Italian invasion) and urges separation. To Harrar, which k
pens to be the native land of the Emperor himself, Cairo likewise i-
vocates a breaking away from Ethiopia. Eritreans hear appeals to joia
the Arab League, since this is the only part of Ethiopia where some
of the Moslems are also Arabs. And Radio Cairo encourages the de-
tachment of the southern part of Ethiopia, populated by Somalis, by
promoting the cause of Greater Somaliland, which would make one unit
out of French Somaliland, British Somaliland, Somalia and the Ethiopian
Somali country.

Here Nasser strikes at another African country already confided to
Africans, for Somalia is tire former Italian Somaliland, for which the
United Nations decreed independence. If all these campaigns succeeded,
the disjointed sections of Ethiopia which would remain should be prey
for any country interested in gaining control over the sources of the
Blue Nile. 44

These excursions are directed by a junta which early learned
that, at home, words breed responsibilities. Hence, it reserved for
dissemination abroad the words that shape desire and incite
action. To its own restive rural population E.S.B. spoke less thun-
derously, in another accent and vocabulary, of the tasks of con-
struction and the building of a Good Society.

But the withholding of words also bad consequences. In the
first period after Naguib’s replacement by Nasser, the rural com-
munication void was filled by messages diffused through traditional
channels of oral communication. Nasser’s early distaste for the
politics of vox populi put his government at a disadvantage vis-a-vis
the extremist factions. The Muslim Brothers and the Communists
were well organized to sustain informal oral networks among both
proletariat and peasantry. Nor did vigorous security action cut
these networks. Despite Nasser’s stringent measures, the London
Times reported on September 23, 1954; “Communist leaflets con-
tinue to circulate, Communist doctrines are popular in university
circles and die organization, with some 7,000 members, seems to
remain in being.” 45

Both Communists and Ikhwan actively recruited, among th e
unemployed surplus of college graduates, cadres capable of dif-
using throughout Egypt a uniform set of messages. Despite their

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 257 )

divergent sources, tliese messages have tended to produce one
common political effect: namely, to make more difficult the rule
of moderation among the elite by constant agitation for extremist
solutions among the masses. Thus, while E.S.B. stirred popular
restlessness abroad, the home territory remained exposed to agi-
tation by potential counter-elites. Nasser, worried, sought to recoup
his position by approaching vox populi directly. His own broad-
casts, now frequent, mark a radical innovation in public style by
using the vernacular tongue known as "Egyptian Arabic.” 40 He
has also "popularized” his philosophy by giving the "national revo-
lution” an excessive, and possibly crippling, lead over the "social
revolution.”

This involved a basic revision of his own historical formula—
to stake Egypt’s role on pan-Arabism and pan-Islam elevated tra-
ditional symbols to the global level without clarifying any modem
goals. To declare Egypt, historically tolerant of minorities, now
a Muslim nation unleashed die violent xenophobia of fanatics while
silencing the voices of modem rationality. In the junta’s own weekly
al-Tahrir ("Liberation”), the editorial of April 10, 1956 read: "Every
Egyptian is proud to be a Goebbels. Britain was able to defeat
one Goebbels, but it will never prevail over the innumerable
Goebbels who have emerged in Egypt now.” This has seemed to
some observers, including very many Egyptians, a retrograde ver-
sion of modernity. Writes Professor von Grunebaum: “The more
closely Islam identifies church and state, the more it will be forced
to build a modem' house on fictitious traditionalist foundations.” 47

Within the Egyptian tradition there are usable clues for an
elite seeking both interior reconstruction and external dignity.
But their effective instrumentation requires an unabashedly secular
elite, open to new aspirants. Instead, Nasser has chosen to rule
with a military clique, which appeases revolutionary-reactionary
fanaticism while moving toward a totalitarian model of mass so-
ciety. Here upward mobility does not reward excellence in the
varied productive roles needed for modernization, but is pre-
empted by those skilled in mobilizing mass enthusiasm for the
central power. The elite does not embody before the public those
v alues which all may emulate; it survives by spreading the belief
lat only mass enthusiasm for the current Leader can avenge the
crrible past and speed future felicity. Among the paradoxical re-

( 258 ) The Arab Worlds

suits of such a strategy is this: the elite soon becomes captive to
the mass. Edmond Taylor has vividly sketched this process at weft
in Egypt today:

Educated Arabs, whether they are steeped in the lofty tradition
of their own culture or oriented towards the West, shy away from the
mongrel pattern of Nassers leadership even when they are passionately
dedicated to the cause of Arab unity, and many of them fear or hie
him in their hearts. The fellah and the desert nomad care nothing for
Nasser one way or tire other. But to the gutter-barbarians of the teem-
ing Near Eastern or African slums and to the uprooted, muddle-minM,
inferiority-obsessed young Arab intellectuals who are tom between East
and West, Nasser— at least since the Canal coup (in Egypt he was
a curiously unpopular dictator before that)— has become the perfect,
irreproachable, untouchable champion of Arabism against the world,
So strong is the pressure of the invisible mob that Nasser has conjured
up in all the Arab countries, that even his critics and his enemies, bow-
ing themselves to be his future victims, now feel obliged to applaud or
uphold him in public. This increases his prestige with the masses, which
in turn increases the mob pressure on the Arab elite, and this unpre-
dictable political chain reaction, unless it is somehow halted in the new
future, seems likely to vaporize every stable, independent Arab authonty
outside of Egypt. 48

6. Which Way Is Forward?

In “vaporizing” all other .authority, can authority b
itself remain stable? Can the course Nasser has set reach its goa
on his terms, under his leadership? The failures elsewhere to c <®
struct a stable governance on such terms— Iran under Mossa eg
for example— show that the case is difficult. How durable is P u 1C
support organized by displacing hatred against an external enemy
—Britain, the West, the Baghdad Pact, Israel? The rich imager)
of invective against Israel (“thorn in our flesh,” “bone in 081
throat”) suggests that this hostility can be sustained a long w e
by the mass media. But the basic wants for a better life amonf:
Egyptians are little supplied by such transitory satisfactions. 8
signs of long-term instability, visible before Suez, are still P r ® se ^

The dedicated band who made the revolution and formed e
B.C.C. has already been decomposed. General Naguib is gone
under house arrest for years. Major Salah Salem, original junta
spokesman, is gone— publisher of a tame Cairo newspaper. So JS
former Vice-Premier Gamal Salem. Shortly after seizure of the

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 259 )

Canal, when huge Nasser portraits began to appear everywhere,
Gamal Salem remarked to a newsman: “There is only one tiring
on which I agree with the Communists. I am against the person-
ality cult" This comment was suppressed by the censor and
shortly thereafter he was dismissed. A coincidence, perhaps, but
Gamal Salem no longer makes his voice heard in the ruling council.

Decimation of the leadership occurs, as we have seen, against
the background of an incapacitated elite. This elite still lives
spiritually in the Western world, whence derive its main ideas
of the good life in a participant society. But it lives physically
in the Middle Eastern world of massive inequality, widespread
illiteracy, prevailing destitution, early death, and the constrictive
power of traditionalism. Highly involved in the symbols of na-
tional aspiration, these persons find no guidance in Koranic funda-
mentalism. Nor is the Nasser way their way. The modern world
imposes new problems and makes available new solutions. Psychic
displacement of the elite between the ancient world of piety and
the modem world of ingenuity is possibly the most fundamental
problem of stable governance in Egypt.

A third area of instability is die failure to develop a program
that may bring the rural mass to a decent level of life. The real
difficulties, which seem almost insurmountable widrin the theo-
retical framework of classical market economics, were not obviated
when Nasser turned from them, after a brave start, to global poli-
tics. While no easy solution is ready at hand, it is clear that possible
ways out of the vicious circle of poverty are not necessarily ad-
vanced by giving the peasantry a spurious “public voice” before
it has acquired a real “social stake.”

The Egyptian mass is willy-nilly being shaken out of its tra-
ditional routines. The rule of cotton has, over the past few genera-
tions, spread awareness of interdependence with the wide world.
Concentration upon an external enemy has diffused a minimum
sense of common nationality. Their position as the new media
targets has brought die outer world into an acute focus of their
attention and exposed them to an unfamiliar range of expectations
and demands. Through their accustomed oral network come the
new agitators, bodi Communist and Ikhwcm, polarizing sentiment
around ostensibly conflicting long-run goals but with die common
shdhT t f < *ystallizing resdess discontent. Traditional pas-

,S replaced h > r a ne "' “dvism. Thus the Egyptian mass gets

The Arab Worlds

( 260 )

under way, and the classic question acquires anew urgency:
way?

A fourth main area of crucial policy decisions concern in-
dustrial development. There is little hope for a satisfying kfc
without some suitable adaptation of modem technique. Ciy,
factories, markets are indispensable under the rale of modem livfc;
This requires, in behavioral terms, a population equipped for re-
duction and consumption— a population quite different in its std
of life from the rural folk who planted cotton seeds before the rd
waters of the Nile arrived and picked cotton puffs when te
receded. Needed are people who, among other things, read d
write, tell time, change underwear, and go to die movies. T&ec
are the people who make things sold to odiers and buy tea
made by others. A key role is played by die industrial woiltq
whose routines of daily life become decisive for ose o ier -b
ments that work in shops and offices, schools and ospita s, <*•
port and communications. Working class standards e ne ^
tours of the urban-industrial sector and ultimate y o e •
as a whole. The future of Egypt hinges, in this sense, up

future of its industrial workers. ,

Among the Workers, three common attributes stand o

pecially noteworthy: (1) their high mobility; ( ) 61 ^

alienation; (3) their social utopianism. In contrast o ‘ ^

still rooted in dieir familiar soil (albeit with a ne\V ey
larger world which buys their cotton), die Workers
acquired some psychic mobility. They are prepare ^

themselves in strange and unfamiliar environments, e
most striking single datum is the readiness exhibite y ^
to leave Egypt and live in a foreign country. T ieir < ^

nationalism is die reciprocal of their growing sense o c ‘ .

will live in any country that responds to their new ema ^
more secure life at a higher level of well-being. e ,
versal Anglophobia around them, several Workers dec arc ^ j
selves quite ready to live in Britain. One asked on y. .
educate my children and get medical treatment for mm ^
Anodier put die point sharply: “I am in favor widi any pars ^
helps me. If the British people provide me with money an
a job for me, I will certainly love diem.” (072) c ^ ne

Many would choose to live in the United States for JC ^
reasons. Says one: “Workers are well paid there and can 1

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 261 )

'rood life like big employees in Egypt” (191) Another: "It is an
industrial, big nation. A worker like me can find work there with a
suitable wage and limited hours.” (313) A third says wistfully: Is
it as we hear, a magnificent life?” Other Workers would just as soon
go to Russia. One tells why: "It makes no difference between the
rich and the poor but everyone according to his cleverness. It is
a great city where you find the equality and I would like to live
there.” (213). The essential point, that national symbols are sub-
ordinate to class demands, is contained in another Worker’s re-
sponse: “I can't choose any exact country to live in. I am ready
to go anywhere if there is work for me there. I am sure I can work
in any country.” (245)

One Egyptian interviewer, struck by this new class-conscious-
ness, summarized what he had learned from the survey by insisting
that "die worker is becoming a man who must be respected and
appreciated.” As this small class grows and develops an “organiza-
tional weapon,” its power becomes a multiple of its size. As their
influence grows in the streets, factories and market places, so their
potency increases in the political arena. Seeing a large gap between
what they want and what they get, the Workers look to government
as the source of new social policy. This and any future government,
confining its attention to the easier terrain of international maneuver,
will sooner or later be forced to recognize that a potentially power-
ful class at home keeps its gaze firmly riveted on the primacy of
social reform.

The rural mass moves in the same direction, though its pace is
slower and its organizational gains less cumulative. A distinctive
feature of Communist and lkhwan agitprop strategy is the effort
to conjoin proletarians and fellahin in a single apparatus of mass
action. Nasser’s success in making himself the Number One Voice
of Arab Islam has, at least temporarily, stalled their advance. But
no evidence indicates that their leaders have been converted or
silenced. Rather, these counter-elites remain an autonomous force
in being. The junta can neutralize their appeal only by adopting
their special revolutionary-reactionary syndrome of populism anti-
capitahst, “integral nationalist” symbols. But the junta can hardly
nuly, under Mich banners, the new middle class of secular intellec-
£ ^bonal entrepreneurs, efficient managers, liberal landowners

The r USt ^ be , Created in order t0 be “represented.”

ihe old symbols impede policies that would activate new enter-

The Arab Worlds

( 262 )

prises. For the junta, preoccupied with its ideological flanks, ne-
glects its main line of advance. Professor Gibb has lucidly sms-
marized the situation:

Inevitably, as the nationalist leaders felt mass support slipping
away they made ever more violent efforts to regain it by continuing to
harp on the continued presence of European forces or enterprises h
controls, or on the hidden hand of Western diplomacy and on Western
support of Zionism. When accused of neglecting social issues, fey
insisted that those were secondary and controversial, and must not dis-
rupt the nation's united determination to achieve its national aims. How-
ever genuinely the politicians desired national independence, they did
not know what to do with it. Concentrating on its negative aspect as
freedom from interference and without positive program, they cowd
only try to fill the void of policy by propaganda . 49

The current leadership thus finds itself in a position where,
confronting long-run social problems of extreme difficulty, it has
sought to operate with a short-run communication strategy. Sue a
political posture is inherently unstable. Pan-Arabism an m
I slam abroad, however skillful, are not likely ultimately to so\e
class-conflicts at home. This is the dilemma of Egyptian governance
and thereby hangs its future.

O O O

While I was in Cairo, in March 1958, Nasser retl | rn . et \^p„_
his first visit to Syria as President of the new Unite m
public. The streets of Cairo were jubilant for days e ° re a
after his return. From dawn till midnight the young en us *‘^
jammed into requisitioned trucks, trolleys and busses, c° u ^
through the streets of Cairo incessantly chanting & ^ ^

In one government department, as I sat in the directors o ^
clamorous concert arose in the corridor outside his door, is
ployees wanted the morning off to go and welcome
President— who had, in fact, been home three days alrea y. ^
Egyptian workday for government employees ends at •
Said the director drily: “Isn’t it curious that they are always mo
by these patriotic urges in the morning?” . j j0

There are circuses aplenty in Egypt nowadays. There is <■
bread. The government has used much of its precious foreign® ^
change for wheat purchases that assure the supply of brea
nominal prices kept low by official subsidy.

Bread and circuses sustain the sort of high morale that ' ee P

Egypt: The Vicious Circle ( 263 )

'the streets resonant with cliants of ,r Ya GamaU” But high morale
! docs not automatically solve the crucial problems of growth and
governance in Egypt. It tends, sometimes, to complicate matters.
The Director whose corridor had been taken over by demon-
strators considered himself victimized by mass morale. As he ex-
plained, at a subsequent sociable meeting, his department was
charged with producing an urgently-required report for the plan-
ning agencies. If he let the demonstrators go, as they had de-
manded on three successive days, the work would not be done
in time and he would be charged with inefficiency. If he did not
let them go, they would not work properly out of spite and he
would additionally be charged with lack of patriotism.

Such dilemmas occur regularly among bureaucrats, teachers,
journalists and professional men— people charged with rational
tasks in an environment pervaded by the irrational compulsions of
mass morale. This is tire cost to rational social institutions of the
high morale gained by charismatic personal leadership. The more
effective the charisma, usually, the higher the cost.

Nasser must now cope with these problems raised by his great
personal success. Of that success, since Suez and the United Arab
hepublic, no observer can any longer doubt. On my travels around
Egypt, Syria, Lebanon in die spring of 1958, the presence of
Nasser was palpable everywhere. Those who did not love him
feared him. But none ignored him.

Charisma is a great power in an area still respectful of tradi-
tion but newly desirous of modem gains. Such power can be used
for good or ill by the man who wields it. Nasser’s place in history
remains to be defined— for tire real work of modernization lies
before, not behind, him. But already, it is clear, die Middle East
will never be die same as it was before Nasser rose. He has shaped
and diffused a new image of self-and-society in Egypt and the
area. If he cannot satisfy its requirements, this image may prove
his undoing. But the image itself will remain.

VIII.

Syria: The Lures of Extremism

"The serious threat ... is the existence within our
own personal attitudes and within our own institu-
tions of conditions which have given a victory to
external authority, discipline, uniformity and de-
pendence. . . .”

—John Dewey

"Military service is the best means for training die
soul so that it can face hardships."

—Syrian Schoolteacher

IN AN AREA rocked by explosive politics, Syria is a case
study of political instability. A merchant-landlord oligarchy, long
in control of the nations wealth and power, latterly has been
challenged by an army officer class. Under variant ideological
amalgams of Nationalism, Arabism, and Islam, the competing
groups have sought to rally a popular following. But the gulf be-
tween the few and the many has been too deep for steady traffic.
A long history of mass indifference, alike to oligarchic governance
and counter-elite contentiousness, is reinforced by a traditional
communication system. Peasant and worker remain nonparticipant
in the political dramas enacted at or near the social apex.

Political challenge in Syria comes not from die deprived masses,
but from the alliance between young army officers and the radical
intelligentsia of the “new middle class.” The interviews with young
bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers and students documented their
disaffection and their groping for dangerous solutions. Claiming
elite status by virtue of their education and modernity but feeb'ng
cheated by the immobile traditional “system,” these men merge
dieir personal frustrations with national grievances in ways that
undermine stable government without producing durable changes.

( 264 )

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( £65 )

The existing tensions are aggravated by the governing elite's short-
sighted communication strategy: pronouncements are made that
raise expectations which cannot be met The resulting turmoil of
postwar politics has produced no less than six military coups d'dtat.
The growing mobilization of intellectuals in the Communist move-
ment, which up to now has not shown its strength openly, augurs
a stormy future.

The chronic inability of Syrian governments to maintain them-
selves in power signalizes the social schism. Challenged by an
articulate new class, the traditional institutions deteriorate while
the incorporation of more satisfying ways lags. In the absence of
minimal social stability, the chances of efficient government are
reduced. Conversely, when government's persuasive and coercive
functions are ineffectively executed, there is little chance of social
stability and less of stable growth. Tins is a reciprocal relationship
akin to Egypt’s “vicious circle In Syria the circularity is neither
so deep nor so comprehensive as in Egypt, but it is compounded
of an underdeveloped economy and underparticipant population.
A glance at the Syrian economy indicates some of the heavy limita-
tions which such a social setting imposes on the policy scope of the
national center.

1. The Social Setting of Political Instability

A modernizing economy requires an evolving division of labor.
This develops an urban-rural market network which enables an
increasing number of people to earn and spend cash in exchange
for a variety of goods. Syria has no occupational census and labor
force estimates vary widely. The approximations are that about
703? of Syrians get their living directly from agriculture and 1%
(under 40,000) work in factories, half of these in textiles. The
Beduin still outnumber the industrial labor force. 1

Some postwar industries were established in textiles, cement,
and food processing— the major "natural” industries— but the irri-
gated area for agriculture almost doubled. The continuing primacy
of agriculture as a ready channel for enterprise indicates that post-
war industrial growth already has strained its short tether. An
International Bank team concluded that the new factories may
already be overequipped, that business growth can continue only
if accompanied by a large development program in the other

( 266 ) The Arab Worlds

sectors. But there are large impediments. One is die slow rate of
capital foimation in the rudimentary monetary and banking system.
Savings do not enter the capital market, but are hoarded or invested
directly, thereby limiting credit institutions. The lack of natural
resources (mineral and oil deposits, energy sources, natural ports)
combines with lack of skilled labor, technicians, managers to im-
pede industrial development.

The agrarian economy goes with the traditional social setting.
A condition of modernization is mobility. But, in Syria, obsolete
transport confines mobility to a narrow population belt along the
Western frontier. Remnants of the old Berlin-to-Baghdad and Hijaz
railways do not serve contemporary traffic flows, providing only
.67 railway route kilometers per 100 square kilometers as compared
to 4.50 in Lebanon. Road systems do not compensate for this lack;
dry weather roads (completely impassable during the winter rains)
in 1948 totaled only 8 kilometers compared to Lebanon’s 43 per
100 square kilometers. Moreover, Syria’s 12 passenger cars per
1,000 population compared with 77 in Lebanon. There is no good
link between the grain-cotton producing Northeast and the ex-
porting-distributing Northwest.

Another condition of modernization is rising per capita income
distribution. But, despite the doubling of real national income since
1939, average per capita income in Syria is only $123— half that of
Lebanon. 2 The great majority of Syrian fellahin live at subsistence
levels, outside the national market, and consume much of their
produce directly. Two-thirds own no land, but sharecrop large
estates, turning over 50-80 per cent of their crops to landlords,
tractor owners, and irrigation pump proprietors. Indebtedness ties
them to the land as it did the medieval European serf. Stricken
with malaria, trachoma, and intestinal infection, they live in mud
huts which are often shared with animals. The peasant small-
holders have no better living standard, and usually sharecrop
additional plots to survive. Hardest is the lot of the landless laborers,
who live on a starvation wage: "They can only eat enough in
harvest time, and in winter must subsist on maize, bread and grass.

Syrian institutions interact to keep the peasantry submerged.
The tenure system affords no security. Further, as subsistence
agriculture is a bad risk for bankers and credit institutions are
poor, the peasants must rely on merchants, landowners and pro-
fessional moneylenders for loans at exhorbitant rates. There is

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 267 )

IfftJe incentive to increase fellahin productivity since the landlords
automatically tike a larger share. Marketing and transport facilities
are so rudimentary that distribution must be handled by middle-
men, who deprive the individual peasant of gain from his increased
output. Public finance does nothing to rectify the situation. Taxation
is extremely regressive. All marketed produce is taxed at a fixed
rate of 7%. Syria has nothing to match Lebanon's rural property tax
based on income derived from cultivation of the land. Only 10%
of government revenue is derived from income and property taxes
of all kinds; most government funds come from customs duties and
excise taxes, mainly on articles of popular consumption.

Agricultural expansion is feasible. Compared with other Arab
countries, Syria has a favorable man-land ratio: one hectare of
cultivated land for each inhabitant, or 8 to 9 times as much as
Egypt. Cultivable land now uncultivated could accommodate more
than double Syria's present farm population. But this remains
potential, for, under present methods of cultivation, the land does
not now support even its present population. Hence, in the past
two decades, peasants have deserted the land to compete for scarce
urban jobs. They bypass nearby towns and go to the six large cities,
which account for a third of the population. Particularly in Aleppo
and Damascus, where nearly one out of four Syrians live, they
swarm into slums that blight the Old City and its shanty-town
outskirts. The postwar urbani building boom went into high-cost
European-style housing far beyond the range of displaced peasants.
As the wretched overcrowded conditions spread, periodic riots by
urban workers demand that government restrict further influx from
the villages.

To break the vicious circle, some industrialization will be re-
quired. The International Bank Mission estimated that, under fav-
orable circumstances, Syria will have to create at least 20-25,000
new industrial jobs (a 50% increase) during the next six years, just
"to keep its industrial labor market in reasonable balance.” But this
is again a circular problem, for it cannot be tackled until the rural
standard is raised: first, to decelerate movement off the land; and
second, to support industrial expansion. With modernization also
must come the changing lifeways styled by public communication.
Here, too, die Syrian means are feeble.

Our exploration in global statistics (chapter II) showed that
die institutions of modernity are systemic. Charles Issawi, also

( 268 ) The Arab Worlds

with an eye on the Middle East, points out that the 17 currently
operative democracies in the world include the 15 nations with the
highest per capita income and the most equitable distribution of
wealth. 4 Only such nations sustain a modem communication system
which interweaves elite and mass perspectives into a national con-
sensus. Syrian poverty and illiteracy limit media development,
thereby impeding growth of a vital national center and a participant
citizenry. Government awareness of these connections has stimu-
lated efforts to develop a national radio network, but policy has
not been effective enough to dominate economics.

In 1949, when the average per capita income was $100, a radio
cost an average of $135. Only the rich Damascenes and Aleppans
could afford a set. G About 50,000 sets ( including an estimated 5,000
unlicensed sets) were in use— one for every 60 inhabitants. Col-
lective listening facilities increased some audiences beyond the
usual coffeehouse sets. Many Syrian schools and villages have
radio loudspeakers for their central meeting places. But national
poverty and disorganization hamper the government aim of ex-
tending radios to all schools and villages. The limiting factors
include inadequate rural electrification, lack of technicians, trans-
port difficulties (which prevent frequent battery recharging), and
shortage of hard currency to finance import of equipment. Poverty
limits the producing center as well as the receiving periphery. Dur-
ing our survey, four transmitters had been in operation from one
to three years, but as yet provided daytime reception only within
a radius of 30 to 50 kilometers from the capital and Aleppo.

For many Syrian radio listeners, as a result, London was closer
than Damascus. A judge living in the large town of Hama could
not hear Damascus as well as Cyprus and BBC. Unlike die British,
he said, the Arabs

don’t pay much attention and money to have a respectable station. Also
the station is not strong enough to be heard well even in Syria. ... It
needs money which the government is not ready to pay. (015)

Many intellectuals were sensitive to the dangers of a domestic
communication vacuum, which foreign powers would be eager to
fill. Said a wealdiy young lawyer from Homs:

In our country we need a good [radio] station ... so that people
don’t depend on foreign stations. Because nationalism is feeble in our
country we have to build up our means of propaganda and make people
enthusiastic about our culture and not depend on the West. (019)

Syria: The. Lures of Extremism ( 269 )

To shore up "feeble" nationalist sentiment and lessen reliance on
the West are familiar objectives. But their implementation requires
n media system evolved within a matrix of general economic growth.

Similar limitations arc shown by Syrian cinema. Damascus and
Aleppo account for about half of all cinemas and two-thirds of
all seating capacity. Cinema attendance averages about once a
year per capita. About 802 of feature films are imported from
Western countries (60% from the United States). The single Syrian
studio, even with the help of Lebanese capital, produced but one
full-length film and a few documentaries as of 1950. Facilities are
lacking for subtitling in Arabic or "dubbing” the sound track. This
must be done in the country of origin or in Cairo. Foreign films
must therefore be read to be understood, or the Syrian must adjust
to tire strange sounds of Egyptian colloquial. Accordingly, Syrian
respondents of all classes were less favorably disposed to movies
than any other Arabs.

The press also reflects poverty. Syria, with its threefold popu-
lation, produces far fewer papers than Lebanon. None achieves
national circulation and they are held in low esteem by those who
arc readied. Tie press run of dailies ranges from 400 to 3,000
copies, "the latter being a maximum under normal conditions. Only
in outstanding circumstances, such as a political crisis, do some
papers sell as many as 6,000 copies in one day,” 0 Impeding growth
of a healthy press is die small market of literates— only 30% claim
literacy. Recent efforts to expand education can bring an appreciable
increment of newspaper readers only very slowly. For, where child
labor is commonplace and education (particularly for girls) is
devalued, there is great wastage in the educational system. Up to
40% of elementary school pupils leave school before completing
their course and never attain "permanent functional literacy”— de-
fined as die ability to read a newspaper and write a simple letter.
To achieve this level, it has been estimated, five to eight years of
elementary schooling are required. 7 Since mastery of dassical
Arabic is virtually a new language for Arab children— so great is
die gap between written script and colloquial tongue— a sustained
training period is essential.

The linguistic problem has special relevance to newspaper con-
sumption. A high-sdiool graduate and municipal clerk said tiiat
he did not read Barq al-Shamal because "I am not sufficiently
strong in Arabic so as to understand it” (207) Though far more

( 270 ) The Arab Worlds

educated than most Syrians, he is still a limited consumer of the
native press. Those with but a few years of elementary school can-
not master enough of their language to understand newspapers.

The limited public capacity to consume messages reinforces die
national disunity which has plagued Syria before and since inde-
pendence. A subsistence farm economy breeds the poverty, the
illiteracy, the constrictive psyche of tire Traditional— a cluster, we
have seen, which predisposes people to remain within die familiar
channels of local leadership and to feel alien toward the national
center. The absence of consensus between elite and population
opens the way to counter-elite formations of the type which un-
stabilize Syrian politics today. In the next section we shall deal
with the counter-elite of “young effendis” who play such a power-
ful role in Syrian life. To conclude this review of the social setting
which produced them, we here look at the governing elite.

The very concept of a Syrian elite requires qualification. The
native elite did not exercise sustained authoritative power before
1946; from 1949 to 1958 it was displaced by military dictatorship.
During the Mandate, uneasy cooperation between nationalist lead-
ers and tire French was regularly punctuated by open rebellion,
passive resistance, boycotts on the Syrian side; martial law, con-
stitutional suspension, and bombardment of civilians on die French
side. Unable to loosen the French grip, the elite stood by impotently
while parts of Muslim Syria were annexed to Lebanon, autonomous
areas within the Syrian mandate were established, and Alexandretta
was ceded to Turkey. Meanwhile, the French Parliament refused
to ratify the 1936 treaty which granted self-rule within the context
of an alliance. Only after the British wartime occupation could
independence be asserted. Syria, then, had no effective native
leadership on the international level until 1946. 8

In the domestic context, there was a continuous native leader-
ship of sorts. Members or adjuncts of the Syrian plutocracy became
self-constituted leaders, under French tutelage, and used their
political leverage to entrench their oligarchic interests. Effective
power had long been wielded by an elite of “city notables,” who
derived their wealth from large landholdings which they rarely
saw. This class interlapped with the professional class— trained in
the law and medical schools of Constantinople, Beirut or Europe
—and the wealthy merchants. Many landowners were descendants
of the Ottoman elite, which had become a tax-farming class after

Syria: The Lures of Extremism C 271 )

the original military basis of Ottoman feudalism had deteriorated. 9
The rentiers were peculiarly rapacious; none of the interest in
actual cultivation found among tire European landed gentry mod-
erated their profit-seeking. Amidst the comforts of urban life, they
dabbled in commerce, sent their sons to professional schools, and
learned to play the complex game of Arab politics.

Tire Mandate strengthened their power. Since ‘‘the French re-
lied on the collaboration of the wealthy upper class, that is, on
the landowners, [they] could make no fundamental reforms in the
land system.” 10 Various French land reform measures were abortive:
e.g., the attempt to extend rural credit Other virtuous efforts mis-
carried: c.g., large-scale irrigation tl»t produced more water than
was needed in some places and not enough elsewhere. Such basic
reforms as secular village education and land tenure reform were
barely attempted. Other measures, modifying the protective Otto-
man code, buttressed the landlord’s position over against the share-
cropping tenants: c.g., tvaqf properties formerly held inalienable
were sold to businessmen and landowners; tire right of ownership
after ten years’ cultivation, which had put some land in peasant
hands, was abrogated. Nor did the urban workers fare better. In
1939, the French opposed labor legislation before the Mandate
Commission because "local industrial circles fear the serious con-
sequences which may follow a sudden change in regional tradition
and customs if new social legislation is introduced to regulate con-
ditions of labor, child and women labor, and workmen’s compensa-
tion.” Tire Mandatory' did not wish “a servile imitation of the
schemes in force in Western industrial countries. . . . Before social
laws are issued and the workers are given weapons against their
employers . . . the handicrafts should be protected and raised
once more to an honored place.” 11

The weal tlr of the landlord-merchant elite was thus increased
by Mandatory policy, while their aspirations for power were con-
stantly thwarted. The French played the classic game of divisive-
ness. Every internal minority— linguistic, ethnic, regional, religious
or nomadic— was encouraged to develop its own case. This deprived
the elite core of Damascus nationalists of a constituency in the
land. Undermining any potential national center was a policy de-
veloped by the Ottomans, who “maintained their authority by
exploiting the rivalry of sects and class.” 12 The French relied
primarily on territorial division, cutting up the Syrian mandate

^ 272 ) The Arab Worlds

into autonomous sections and reducing the projected Arab c b
to a smaU land-locked endave around D JZs
patronage and educational policy also figured as divisive teds-
mques The particularism of Druzes, ‘Alawis and other minorities,
strengthened by the Mandatory policy, continued to plagued
cus even after formal unity and independence had been achieved
ational control by the Damascus center also is weakened by
m nomad challenge to organized government which has peren-
m y rvided the Middle East. Damascus claims that it has re-
duced the proportion of nomads in the total population from 1»
to 6% in 25 years. 13 But restricting their movements is only a start
A new set of thoughtways must develop before the Beduin can be
integrate into national life; and a workable relation between
armers and nomads must still be found in the regions too dry
to support agriculture. The human transformations needed to make
a citizen out of a Beduin are suggested by one respondent:

Though I have a Syrian passport-still I don’t feel I am so. We
» - Uir Lf re f V, sec ^ . to a different life and we are primarily loyal to our
ir ‘ e follow him to death and we have 70,000 men with rifles and
some machine guns. We can shake the desert if we want. (005)

The lack of widespread national participation in central gov-
ernment shows in the low "circulation of the elite” The original
core o andowning nationalists has exhibited amazing homogeneity
an longevity. Although postwar authority has had to be shared

TT h exo ^ enous arm y officers and with assorted extremists of the
g t an Left, the same names keep recurring in Syrian parlia-
mentary life. A biographical analysis of about 75 deputies and
ministers in the 1936 Chamber of Deputies (the first had been
e ec e in 1932) is still a pertinent guide to the current wielders
° power. 4 The elite status of this group is shown by its educational
a amment. Fully one-third had professional degrees acquired in
ranee, ^ witzerland, Damascus and, less frequently, Constantinople
f n , --Over half had completed secondary studies of some
£md, only four reporting no education. That many were able to
ave a roa for their education indicates their access to wealth,
every five deputies in 1936, three were middle-aged (between
anc ), one was under 37 and one was over 58. The great
majority were Sunni Muslim. The largest occupational group
vere ie an owners. Next were the ex-Ottoman functionaries, many

Syria: The Lures of Extremhm ( 273 )

of whom had been displaced by French administrators. Then came
g lawyers, C doctors and 7 merchants (of whom 3 were also land-
owners). There were no journalists or literary men, engineers or
teachers. The deputies had experienced an eventful military and
political past. About half had been exiled, imprisoned or forced to
flee tire country during tire Mandatory regime. “Many,” Signora
Vacca notes, “arc stories of administrative and military careers
broken by the advent of the Mandate.” Tsventy deputies had fought
ns officers on the Ottoman side in World War I. Only six had
fought to preserve Faysals regime from the French, but more had
participated as irregulars in the 1925 revolt. Many had been mem-
bers of the Syrian Congress of 1919-1920, which pressed the claims
of Arab nationalism upon the Paris Peace Conference.

A recent analysis of the thirty key political personalities in Syrian
politics (excluding army politicians) showed much the same con-
figuration. 15 Many old names recurred, and continuity was indi-
cated by age: IS were over fifty and 12 were over sixty years of
age. Again, landowners, lawyers, and old Nationalist fighters pre-
dominated. Personnel makes policy— and it has been aptly said
that the Nationalist Bloc, in gaining independence, removed "tire
only plank in the party’s political platform.” 10 In internal matters,
the national leaders were extremely conservative, resolutely opposed
to any program of reform. Although underpopulated Syria was a
promising area for Arab refugee settlement, and though impressive
American aid would have made refugee integration a great step
forward in economic modernization, this proved absolutely unac-
ceptable to the Syrians. Later, in the same spirit, they rejected
Point IV aid. The prospect of economic development held no charm
for those who feared they might lose power by diffusing wealth.

Only education received vigorous expansion— in one postwar
decade showing twelvefold increase in educational expenditure. 17
But activism here was oriented to immediate indulgence of national
pride rather than long-term growth. The policy was designed for
radical excision of French culture from Syria even if, in the proc-
ess, the ostensible patient might suffer a severe setback. The lan-
guage issue was central. The government of Faysal, among its first
acts, had declared Arabic to he the sole medium of national com-
munication. 18 Subsequently the French ousted Faysal, and estab-
lished their language in all state schools and law courts along
with Arabic. (They showed some restraint by starting French in-

( 274 ) The Arab Worlds

struction only in the fourth grade, by which time the Lebanese
pupil already used French with some facility.) In 1944, while
French troops were still in control of Syria, the newly constituted
Nationalist Government abolished the teaching of French in
elementary schools and brought pressure upon private schools to
do the same. Its aim was to de-Europeanize the state school system
and to undermine the foreign schools. Although Syria’s only foreign
institution of higher education was the American junior college in
Aleppo, she had been second only to Lebanon among Arab coun-
tries in postwar foreign and private school enrollment. By 1951-
1952, with the elementary school population about doubled, the
proportion in nongovernment schools had dropped from 40% to
19 % 10 This radical rearrangement had been abetted by popular
nationalism. When the French bombarded Damascus in 1945,
Syrians responded by boycotting all French schools, which then
accounted for 83% of the foreign school enrollment. The govern-
ment then forced all to close and, by 1947, had permitted only
seven to reopen.

The survey, five years later, revealed the continuing intensity
of this sentiment. A taxi driver declared he would close all foreign
schools if he were head of the government. Reason: “We are through
with foreigners ... we don’t want any more of them . . . foreign
schools teach us not to be patriotic.” (227). Capitalizing on such
sentiments, the government jettisoned the foreign school system.
Standards in public schools were lowered to allow for accelerated
expansion. Foreign language study was discouraged, thus depriv-
ing Syria of needed Western skills among its citizens.

Such subordination of rationality to pride is common among
people frustrated by their status in the modem world and nos-
talgic for the glories of their Golden Age. Syrian leaders, along
with the whole educated class, are occasionally victimized by their
own self-congratulatory reading of liistory. Damascus, which reached
the height of its power and culture over a milennium ago, was
the proud capital of an empire that extended from the Atlantic
coast to the Indus River deep in Central Asia. Muhammad hesitated
to enter the city because he wished to set foot in paradise but
once. 20 The modem heirs of tin's past glory had faced the humilia-
tion of being classified as a backward people by descendents of
those who had been barbarians at the time of the Ummayyads. The
Syrians, in the words of the Mandatory instrument, were “not yet

Syria; The Lures of Extremism ( 275 )

able to stand by themselves tinder the strenuous conditions of the
modem world,” and hence their well-being and progress formed
"a sacred trust of civilization ” The erasure of these rankling words
became an overpowering aim. But the elite’s obsessional concern
with its own status symbols provided no relief for the prevailing
poverty and ignorance in its social setting. The rise of an urban
counter-elite, which has shaken the old leadership, is abundantly
evident today. The 1951 survey provided some illuminating data
on this corps of "Young Effendis.”

2. The Young Effendis:

From Personal Frustration to Political Extremism

The Turkish elite under Atatiirk rapidly integrated the edu-
cated urban young men into the new national life, so that the
stratum which earlier had supplied elite Ottomans now produced
new-style Turks. The design of Turkish modernization built insti-
tutions that would incorporate newly participant elements. The
Republic thus adapted Ottoman administrative wisdom, which as-
sured political stability by incoiporating those who might form
the opposition. In Syria, by contrast, the old elite excluded new
aspirants and thereby engendered a counter-elite within its own
social class. The ruling group paid no heed to the “young effendis”;
now they form an active corps which does not recognize the author-
ity of die old national leaders. This has led to a jurisdictional strug-
gle for power which is relatively unproductive of national welfare.
Indeed, no long-term policy of modernization can be operated while
conflict rages over who will make and who will manage such a
policy. (Appendix B reports an independent distribution of mod-
em attributes, which can be compared with the political typology
in Table 3.)

The young effendis have been able to challenge the old nation-
alists so effectively because they occupy a strategic new terrain
between the apolitical mass and the ruling oligarchy. This is the
terrain of public communication and they occupy it by their loca-
tion in die sociological middle. In Damascus and Aleppo “a middle
class of functionaries and employees has been growing up since
I9-1S, , , . Their flats, between the splendor of the rich quarter
and the huddle of the suq, are being built in quantities and their

( 276 ) The Arab Worlds

new, middle-class way of life is based on European standards.” 21
These young men are turning away from the Nationalist Bloc to
the radical parties which made their appearance in the November
1949 elections— the Arab Socialist Party, the Resurrection Party,
the Syrian National Socialist Party, the Muslim Socialist Front.
Alternately, they became undercover communist supporters. This
group also supplies new recruits to the army officer corps, which
has been involved in all the postwar political crises. Professor
Khadduri writes:

Not infrequently high school teachers and lawyers, dissatisfied with
their professions or believing their ambitions can better be attained in
the army, enter military schools and resume their public careers in the
military service. 22

The course of postwar politics in Syria already has been in-
fluenced by these restless young men who seek status through the
counter-elites. Their influence is likely to grow, for they have shown
their capacity to convert social instability into political crises. The
economics of underdevelopment impels them toward radical ideas.
The number of educated young aspirants for social mobility is
increasing at a much faster rate than the capacity of Syrian insti-
tutions to absorb them satisfactorily. Higher education is no longer
the privilege of a small upper class. From 1923 (the first year
diplomas were issued) to 1950 there were 3,334 graduates of the
Syrian University; the number of graduates in 1950-51 alone was
553, fully one-sixth the number of all previous graduates. In 1952-
53, there were 2,580 students enrolled. 23

Recent development in industry and agriculture has created
shortages of agronomists, engineers, and a range of professional
skills which Syria has been unable to produce at home or to edu-
cate abroad. But the educational system continues to produce a
surplus of lawyers and doctors. (The doctors are not surplus to
the country’s health needs, but almost all remain in the large cities
and engage in strenuous competition there.) Until 1950, over half
of all university graduates were lawyers. That year, about 600
students who otherwise would have entered the Damascus Law
Faculty were drawn into the newly opened School of Arts, drop-
ping the proportion of law students to one-third of the total. In
all likelihood, however, the Arts graduates are looking for the same
kind of job as the lawyers— a white-collar sinecure in government.
Outside the bureaucracy, there is little opportunity to utilize the

Syria.* The Lures of Extremism ( 277 )

skills acquired by legal or humanistic training. These educated
young Syrians predominated in our sample of Modems, of whom
86% were men, 602 under 30 (only 2 % over 50), and 422 Christian
(os compared with 142 Christians in the total population). As
elsewhere, Syrian Christians are more urban, better educated, and
of higher socioeconomic status than the Sunni Muslim majority. 24

These Modems live a Western-style life in the manner of the
wealthy elite, albeit on a more modest scale. They eat beefsteak
and macaroni rather than burghul and shish kebab; the men wear
Western clothes and their women go unveiled (or wear head
scarves as a gesture to tradition); their apartments are equipped
with Western-style furniture. 25 They pursue the same leisure ac-
tivities which characterize the Modem style elsewhere, with some
minor differences. Fewer spend their leisure in reading or sports.
They listen to the radio more than other Modems. Their musical
tastes are more traditional, showing greater fondness for native
folk songs and popular tunes than any other Arab Modems. Only
14%, as compared to 47 % Lebanese Modems, enjoy Western music.
Only 152 consider religion of no importance. Only one out of five
never attends mosque or church, the lowest proportion of non-
attenders among all Modems (though they attend less frequently
than Egyptians).

Although more traditional in these ways than other Modems,
they clearly belong to the Westernized stratum of Syria. Those
forced to live among peasants feel themselves cut off from the
civilized orbit. Thus a village high school teacher complained that
"his environment is not high . . . his surroundings were illiterate
people that he could hardly communicate with.” Although his
"salary can hardly cover his expenses,” he felt so constricted by
village life thnt he constantly spent “a lot of money” in Aleppo
"seeking luxury.” ( 143) A wealthy young judge in the Hama district
also stressed the gap between the Modems and the mass. He found
it almost impossible to administer Western legal codes among
people used to the rule of custom or of die Koran, The judge said
he was unhappy ‘because I am educated among ignorant people.
They can't understand me and I can’t do according to their men-
tality, ... By myself I can’t do anything because it is a huge
task to educate a whole nation.” (015) The theme of noncommu-
nication between educated and ignorant recurred with great fre-
quency.

( 278 ) The Arab Worlds

Even in a relatively large town like Latakia, the Modem feels
isolated. One young landowner, an A.U.B. graduate in political
science, said his greatest problem was ‘how to adapt my environ-
ment to myself.” He had “passed quite a time in foreign schools
and universities. My way of living now is far different. But my
environment does not understand this and believes that if, for
instance, 1 listen to classical music it is to show them that I like
Western things, not because I really like it— they think it is pre-
tension only.” But Arabic music, he declares, has “a had effect on
my nerves. I simply detest it.” (210) Thinking of themselves as a
true elite, these young Moderns are all the more disgruntled with
their own lot and with Syrian politics, neither of which they can
control. A thirty-year-old, college-educated secretary was described
as “too ambitious” by the interviewer, who suspected his “great
confidence in himself and in his talents that will enable him to
become once upon a time one of the outstanding personalities in his
country.” Although this young man occupied a “respectable posi-
tion,” he was discontented because he lacked the income and
deference that he believed his education and talents warranted.
“Though I am working very hard,” he says, “I hardly could secure
a decent life. ... If one has the money, he can do whatever he
likes [such as] buy a car, have a better house.” (171)

Young bureaucrats appear especially disaffected by the current
distribution of wealth and power. Middle East bureaucracy often
is “the haven and catch-all for a large portion of the mediocre, par-
tially educated, and less aggressive aspirants for an easy and
prestigeful position among the white-collar class.” 26 Those more
able persons who do get a government job soon feel victimized
by an unfair system. Pay is low; advancement depends on favor-
itism; inefficiency and corruption create a frustrating atmosphere.
The International Bank Survey described Syrian bureaucracy as
"understaffed in the upper ranks of the service and overstaffed in
the lower ranks,” since 80% of government employees are con-
centrated in the three lowest grades of the service. 27

The bureaucrats and other professionals belong to the ranks
of the “spiritually unemployed.” Like the frustrated young intel-
lectuals manques who sparked the Nazi movement— which appealed
to many restless Syrians— they are not employed in jobs which
make them proud or content, and suffer from seelige Arbeitslosig-
keit (spiritual unemployment ) . One such young man told the

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 279 )

interviewer that he was "not satisfied with his job. He wants to
work in Damascus, and he believes that he deserves a higher salary
than what he is receiving at present.” (040) A 24-year-old junior
clerk, in Damascus, is unhappy "because of my bad financial con-
dition and the environment I am living in which I do not like.
. , . The jobs we can obtain are very limited.” (310) Another bureau-
crat "is not content with his position because he was not promoted.”
He says: "X ought to have better backing. Those from good families
and who have many people in government get promoted easily.
, . , It is unfortunate but this is the case everywhere.” (012)

Pervasive discontent among ambitious young men indicates a
highly immobile elite structure. The jum'or clerk, when asked what
he could do to solve his own and Syria’s problems, replied: “I
can’t do much because nobody will help me and I am all alone.”
(310) He called “die selfishness of the people and the favoritism
diat exists in our government” Syria’s greatest problem. A senior
government clerk, age 27, appeared to have reached a dead end
at that age. “He looks useless,” the interviewer wrote, “fed up
with life, and very weary- about his future.” His main problem
was "die way I get paid, because it is not enough for our stand-
ards of living." Asked if he could do anything about this, he
answered: “No, because whatever I have to say or do no one
would listen. I would only give a bad impression about myself.”
( 13 °) •

Frustration in their private careers was paralleled by despair
over die nation’s political problems. The young effendis were pre-
occupied by government weakness; among all classes concern with
government instability- was greater in Syria than elsewhere. During
our survey, early in 1951, Colonel Shishakli had not yet assumed
direct personal control of the government. After his coup cTdtat
in 1949 he chose to rule through Parliament, allowing the Popu-
list Ska' ab Party- to organize die Cabinet. Never a majority-, the
Populists led an extremely unstable coalition, always subject to
Army pressure and veto power, until December 1951. In our
interviews many respondents reported with pleasure, as their
most recent news, that a new- Cabinet had finally been presented
after a long crisis. But none had illusions that the situation was
at all stable; disgust with government was widespread. A well-
to-do A.U.B. student declared sweepingly:

( 280 ) The Arab Worlds

I object to everything ... the present regime of government . . .
the army governing Syria ... the present distribution of incomes, and
to the whole way of life which the Syrian people are leading. We need
a deep evolution. (044)

Despair often focused upon the press, then under arbitrary
control by the military dictatorship. Syrian Modems were least
satisfied among all Arabs with their native press. About 75% pre-
ferred that newspapers rather than radio stations be closed down,
and 85% of these said that radio is more truthful. Syrian papers,
fiercely competitive for a small reading public, cannot depend on
circulation revenue for their existence but must resort to a variety
of secret or party funds or to blackmail. It was this lack of in-
tegrity that most offended the educated respondents. The Hama
judge complained: "Editors are not loyal to their conscience . . .
they are bribed to give news. We do not have a free press yet.”
(015) A wealthy A.U.B. graduate, head of a school in Homs, at-
tributed to government the low estate of the press:

The newspapers don’t dare mention the facts, because they are
afraid of the government. The Press is not free and the people are
dead. [Do you have an example?] They would praise a man while he
is robbing the people. . . . They talked of Sharabati [Minister of De-
fense] as if he was the most patriotic and he proved to be the most
unreliable and even a thief. This situation is pathetic. . . . When the
press is under pressure and the people are ignorant it will have a bad
influence. . . . (036)

When it came to specifying remedial measures, the young ef-
fendis spoke with less assurance. Some felt powerless, even in
imagination, to change the course of the national crisis. Many
seemed unable even to define the nature of the problems confront-
ing them. A higher proportion here than elsewhere (indeed a
majority of all three types) could give no reason for their inability
to solve the nation’s problems. Further, Syrians were the most
prone among all Arab Modems to present isolate personal solu-
tions to national problems. A third of them suggested programs
that envisaged no support from any existing social group, a per-
spective that ties in with the proclivity for personal dictatorship
expressed by several respondents. The lack of a coherent image of
a desirable national future led some to sullen passivity: “Just wait
for justice to happen” (179); “ Sit and wait what the result will
be.” (178) Others offered a wild array of prescriptions with little

Syria: The Lures of Extremism { 281 )

bearing on the problem they had mentioned. A 25-year-old gradu-
ate of Aleppo College, who said that Syria’s greatest problem is
"disorder,” would adopt the following program if he were head
of government:

1 will build grand theatres.

1 will inalcc parks and gardens.

I will fight the Jews. (160)

The most prevalent response among the young effendis was
advocacy of force and strong moral support for violent dictator-
ship. The inadequacy of Syrian republicanism had no more poig-
nant testimony than the longing of the most Westernized and en-
lightened elements for its termination. A schoolteacher, 26 years
old and an A.U.B. graduate, described Syria’s main problem as "a
government that is not permanent.” As head of the government:
"First I would only make strict laws and reduce the number of
parties, renew the laws and last of all be a dictator .” (074) A Homs
lawyer, who favored social reform, felt that "the whole system of
government” was wrong:

The only way I can do something is to become a dictator. A large
enlightened minority must take hold of the situation by force. ... I
will aim at the support of the army . . . break down unemployment by
opening agricultural projects ... or else we will stay another 100
years dragging. (019)

The sense that a strong man is needed has diffused through
other sects and classes. A retired army sergeant, an uneducated
fellow of 60, said that as head of government:

I would blow up all the government and have a new one that would
respect the people and fear God. [How would you do that?] 1 would
act as a dictator and educate the people to work for their good. I am
not educated and so don’t know what is good and what is not. Yet I
respect laws and expect the government to respect me. (018)

A retired government official, a rich Catholic who spent three
years in Brazil and speaks French and Portuguese, declared: “All
the bad things . . . will be corrected by making a dictator for a
week.” (052) A Maronite teacher-priest, who considered Islam
the greatest problem of Syria, was resentful that a Christian could
not become President. As bead of state, ‘1 will cut all relations
with the other Arab countries, except Lebanon. I will act according
to my own will, because I believe in dictatorship .” (00S) A 30-

( 282 ) The Arab Worlds

year-old member of the Muslim Brotherhood, still in secondary
school and hopeful of attending law school, called "weak and
despotic government” Syria’s greatest problem. As head of state:

I would have a sword and kill all those in the big chairs in the
government now. . . . Once I have done that I could set up a dictator-
ship and strike with an iron hand on all who dare move-that is how
our people understand— and then I would start improvement. (006)

A young housewife said: “It is necessary to have a strong hand
here ... a hand of iron to redress the people and make them ful-
fill their duty.” (193) Finally, a Catholic doctor, worried about
“bad government and army control” would “bring back the real
democratic rules and stop the government from taking the bread
of the poor and encouraging the rich to become richer still.”
Asked how he would do that, he said: “If I am. head I can just
order!' (053)

The longing for stability underlies the desire for dictatorship
among die young effendis. Middle Easterners many centuries ago
decided that tyrannical government is preferable to no govern-
ment. They followed Caliphs, even those lacking the spiritual
qualities required for a Defender of the Law, so long as they
were strong. Since the breakdown of the Arab Caliphate, the area
has been plagued by political chaos; frequent interregnums; in-
vasions by Crusaders, Mamluks, Tatars, and Europeans; wide-
spread economic disintegration and population displacements. 28
In its first 184 years as an Ottoman city, Damascus witnessed no
less than 133 walis, of whom only 33 held the office as long as
two years. 29 There is strong historical tradition for die preference
of despotism over instability.

At the time of the survey, the recent defeat by Israel still
rankled and the current government crisis persisted. Thoughts of
violence and dictatorial solutions provided an extropunitive dis-
placement of affect— projecting blame for the troubled domestic
scene onto foreign enemies. Western imperialists, Israel, other Arab
States were the objects of hostility even among young Modems
who had defined Syria’s major problem as internal instability and
corruption. Militarism was strongly advocated by young effendis
with a sense of frustration. If he were head of the government,
a 30-year-old schoolteacher said:

I will make military service obligatory. . . . Military service is

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( £83 )

the best means for training the soul, so that it can face hardships. This
is point number one in my program. (040)

Many young intellectuals who gave priority to military might
had, aside from this, neither articulate ideas nor concrete programs
for Syria's future. But some carried their displaced affect to ex-
tremist programs of a quite specific order. Another teacher, a
27-year-old Damascene, declared himself to be frustrated by the
dearth of opportunities in Syria. He was unhappy "because I have
wanted to get a better education, but have not been able to do
so." But Syria’s main problem, he said later, was to liberate Pales-
tine from the Jews. He would be willing "to fight in the Army—
either live or die." If he were President, he would carry out a
“complete rearmament of our army on a very' large scale— even if
we have to buy the arms from the devil since America is not sell-
ing us." (311) Likewise, the lawyer from Hama would “strengthen
the Army by alloting 75% of the budget for it Make an extraor-
dinary tax on rich people for the army. Make a secret treaty with
Bussia against American interference. ... I will use a diabolical
policy like that of the West.” (212)

Tire young effendis were not uniformly anti-Western. Some, like
tho Egyptian Modems, exhibited a characteristic ambivalence, in
which desire to emulate and need to reject the West uneasily
coexist. In their personal lives, they self-consciously imitate the
Western style and some ingenuously admit its tutelage. A "pro-
gressive” young government clerk said:

Wien we sec the lives of people in the West, and then compare it
with our own lives, we find that we still have a long way to go before
attaining their level. The movies are . . . like a teacher to us, who
tells us what to do and what not. (310)

Many, however, must belittle the Other in order to esteem the
Self. One young teacher, unhappy with his job, his residence,
his modest income, nevertheless advocated military expansion
rather than economic improvement for Syria. National duty and
personal desire contest within him. Syria’s ‘lack of political, social
and spiritual unity” depresses him; by contrast, "the U.S. is a
rich country in everytliing. The average worker there owns a
motor-car. ... I wish I could live there.” He then caught himself
and added: “I mean I wish I was bom an American. Because, being
a Syrian, I feel that it is my duty' to remain in my' country. Unless
I help her, I will not feel that I am very happy'.”

( 284 ) The Arab Worlds

Ambivalence requires that this desire to emulate be counter-
balanced by a sign of rejection-even a vicarious rejection. Ac-
cordingly, this teacher eagerly consumes anti-Western communi-
cations, His favorite newspapers "speak nothing in favor of the
European countries. [How do you feel about it?] I feel a sort of
mental satisfaction, or call it if you wish spiritual satisfaction.”
He prefers Egyptian films for the same reason. His favorite film
depicted a Westernized villager who "is very straightforward while
his cousin, who wears native clothes, is still shy and backward in
his manners. You see a contrast there between the East and the
West.” The modem fellows sister, educated in the city and re-
turned to her village against her will, is persuaded by her brother
to marry her old-fashioned cousin. “In the films of Yousef Wihbi,”
the teacher explains, “the East always wins over the West. . . .
I feel a kind of satisfaction.” (040)

A Syrian Tito: Preliminary Sketch. The ambivalent young ef-
fendi driven to extremism is a major Syrian figure. His final por-
trait is not yet drawn. But a preliminary sketch emerges from the
1951 interview with a government clerk, 25 years old, a Damascus
Sunni living in modest circumstances (246). When asked hi s main
personal problem, he replied with an explicitness that bespoke
frequent brooding upon his bad luck:

In the first place I could not finish my studies, then I could not
get a position I desired, and thirdly, I could not bring my girl back
with me [back from Paris], and lastly my financial condition is not
very helpful.

His sequence of abortive starts recalls the “uncompleted life ac-
tivities” that characterized the life-histories of those young neo-
intellectuals who became the “armed bohemians” of the Nazi
elite. 30 His dissatisfactions were sharpened by his two years of
engineering study in France, which terminated because he lacked
funds. Back in Syria, he soon found company among the footloose
young effendis who, lacking productive and satisfying uses for
their abilities and aspirations, spend their time merging fantasies
of personal desire and national policy. Their problem, as he put
it, is “thinking about their future—fhat is, the uncertainly of know-
ing what our future is to bring.” The prevalence of revery in this
young man’s life, the dissociation from his current time-place sit-
uation, is signified by the total absence of institutional ties to his

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 2S5 )

society. He belongs to no social groups, considers religion of no
importance, and can find no Arab girl he would care to marry. He
would like to go back to France, but cannot afford it. Although
he calls America a "cheap democracy,” he would go there "on
condition I become an American.”

Frustrated in their personal careers, many young effendis
tend to seek power and glory through political maneuver. This
young bureaucrat, however, apparently combines the usual grandi-
ose desires for political power with a real position of personal
influence among liis peers. According to the interviewer, he is the
"recognized head of his quite large group of young men who are
about to form a party . . . having as slogan Arabism above every-
thing else.” This "opinion leader” thus describes his own program:
"I would like to make Syria a really socialistic state, and try to
approach Russia, in order to get rid of the influence of the West-
ern powers— in other words I would make a second Yugoslavia of
Syria and would be its Tito.” Like many respondents of this type
whom we have quoted, his view of democracy in a “socialistic
state" requires uniform acquiescence to his beliefs rather than a
free exchange of competing ideas. To instill “the proper public
attitude” is Syria’s greatest need: "We should give the public the
proper political and social attitude, by educating them and show-
ing them die right attitude.”

The counter-elite orientation guides the media behavior of this
young man and his followers. His preferred newspaper is al-Nasr,
which, he says, is read "by the government officials in particular
and die middle class in general. Because it gives us die latest
changes in government positions and does not write too much
about our so-called aristocracy." His autobiography is externalized
in his proto-communist program: “to evenly distribute the national
wealth in the country.” He believes that Russian propaganda is
doing an excellent job, that Russia is successful in world affairs
“and will continue to be so, until these social differences which
exist in our countries are done away with . . . their system of life
is one where everybody gets equal shares, and people want tin's
life today."

Although he overtiy repudiates the ruling elite, he shares their
outlook in many respects. Second only to redistribution of wealth
is his desire to "strengthen die Arab cause, in general to build up
a new Arab world, renewing its past glories.” The interviewer notes

( 28G ) The Arab Worlds

that "although he likes foreigners, and in particular the French,
he still believes in drifting away from Western influence.” In part
this is a reaction against a world which is perceived as indifferent
(or hostile); "We cannot depend on any country to help us, for
all of them have imperialist motives regarding us.” It is intelligible
also as a step in the search for a national identity. Here the would-
be Tito exhibits symptoms of the "Nasser syndrome.” If he were
head of a radio station he would not worry about the domestic
audience. "I believe we have enough things for the local population
to listen to,” he remarks, disregarding the vast communication
vacuum in winch a majority of his compatriots live. He would
rather pursue foreign adventures, by stressing overseas broadcasts:
"[We] should not neglect to inform foreign countries of out
presence, and give them our news and ideas just as they give us
theirs.”

Such disaffected young men, with little hope of advancement
under the present social order, provide the counter-elite cadres
of political extremism. They accent the incoherence, instability,
and confusion which prevail in the Syrian political scene. As their
ideology is a displacement of personal desires onto public issues,
with minimal analytic content, any demagogic appeal that prom-
ises self-advancement is likely to elicit a response among them,
whether from tire extreme Right or Left. Their special combina-
tion of Leftist populism and Rightist nationalism has become a
useful instrument of popular agitation throughout the Arab arena.
The once dissonant themes of nationalist dictatorship and popu-
list socialism now are orchestrated by the young effendis as the
New Harmony.

Few among these challengers of existing institutions invoke
the symbols of a more participant, more democratic social order.
In their eyes, democracy has been discredited in Syria. Tire young
men want to be dictators, whether as head of a Communist satel-
lite, a Military cabal, a Fascist party, or a National Socialist state.
They begin by displacing their personal frustrations onto political
objects; they continue by constructing extremist ideologies of the
national welfare; and they end by tying national aspirations to the
shifting of world politics. Hence the paradox that those who claim
to promote national welfare often wind up by seeking foreign
adventures which are likely to impede the course of Syrian mod-
ernization. Even the Syrian Tito, starting from the desire for an

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 287 )

autonomous national policy independent of foreign entanglements,
comes to the same end. Syrians apparently have come to see their
national future as inevitably tied to world politics. Many, indeed,
have hitched their wagon to one of the bipolar stars.

The young effendis have played a role in tin's process. Ranging
themselves ns a counter-elite, they reduced the chances of stable
central government by embracing a strategy’ of opposita'onism.
Tin's obliged them— once they had projected their domestic frus-
trations into the world arena— to oppose the foreign policy of die
government they had rej'ected. The obvious opposite of official
pro-Westernism was a radical pro-Russianism. Some of the young
effendis were uneasy about' this bipolarity— an ambivalence rooted
in a taste for Western culture and branching into Syrian variants
of Titoism, Others associated the "primitive Bolshevism” of their
predilection for violence and dictatorship with the current ideology
of the U.S.S.R. As the young effendis occupy Jrey posts in Syrian
public communication— as teachers, journalists, civil servants, law-
yers and judges— their ideas get a wide hearing. Pro-Russian senti-
ment has become highly visible in Syria during the years since
the survey was made. But die data contain some clues to the pat-
tern of diffusion. To diese we now turn.

3. A Typology of Political Attitudes 0

The attitudes of die young effendis indicated that pro-Russian
sentiment would not be located in simple socioeconomic packages.
This was demonstrated by classifying all respondents who ex-
pressed pro-Russian attitudes according to their economic status, as
in Table 1. Clearly, as many “well-off” as “destitute” respondents ex-

Table I-

— Pro-Russian Attitudes

Rich

31%

Well-off

44

Model!

30

Poor

IS

Deitilule

4S

* This section is based on the 1952 BASR report “Syrian Attitudes Toward
America and^ Russia" by W. N. McPhce and R. B. Meycrsohn. The account
here given is highly condensed in anu'eipation of a fuller report by tire
authors. , -

( 288 ) The Arab Worlds

pressed pro-Russian attitudes, and “poor” respondents least of all.
Moreover, the tone and content of the utterances ranged from simple
sentiment to doctrinaire dogmatism.

To deal adequately with these responses required a more
comprehensive context of political attitudes. Five questions asked
in the interviews had consistently provided, as we saw in preceding
chapters, a useful guide to the respondent’s political posture. These
were:

1. What is the biggest problem that people in the same circumstances
as yourself face in life?

2. Is there anything that you as an individual can do to solve this
problem?

3. What would you say is the biggest problem that Syria as a nation
faces today?

4. What do you think people in the same circumstances as yourself
can do to help solve this problem?

5. Suppose you were made head of the government, what are some
of the things you would do?

A qualitative analysis was made of responses to this battery of
questions. Respondents were classified first as Right or Left-
according to the type of problems which were salient to them.
Right respondents were concerned mainly with problems of the
national posture ; Left respondents gave priority to problems of
social reform. Each group was then subdivided into three ranks
of extremism, and respondents were classified by the degree of
violence they proposed for solving the problems they had named.
For example, all Left respondents worried about the inequitable
distribution of wealth— but a mild Reformer would “pass an in-
come tax” whereas an extreme Revolutionary would “hang the
landlords!” Similarly, all Right respondents were concerned with
national prestige— but a mild Conservative proposed new elections
whereas an extreme Nationalist demanded violence (“Kill the
the foreigners!” or “War against Israel”).

This produced six types of political attitudes cross-classified
by content and by intensity. A seventh type of respondent saw
public problems only in a personal light, like Traditionals every-
where in the Middle East, and these were classified as Apolitical.
On this typology, 251 Syrian respondents distributed as shown
in Table 2.

Syria: The Lures of Extremism

( £89 )

Table 2 — Political Types

Revolutionary left

6

Middle tefl

AO

Reform tefl

45

Apoliticals

38

Conservative Right

47

Middle Right

44

Notionalist Right

31

Total

251

In studying these figures, die reader must recall our oft-repeated
caution that no extrapolation can be made from such distributions
to die national distribution of pro-Communist or other political
attitudes in Syria today. We are dealing only with die distribution
of attributes within die controlled sample of political types. This
gives us a "profile” for each type. Where differences are clear-cut,
one may infer that such a “profile” will tend to be associated with
persons of each political type tiiroughout Syria.

Table 3 shows the distribution of relevant social attributes
among the political types and links them with our basic typology
of modernization. The Apoliticals correspond most closely to the
Traditionals in our basic typology. They show die largest profile of
rural, illiterate, destitute and nonparticipant persons among the
political types. They discuss the issues facing Syria in the constrictive
style of Traditionals. A housewife said: “I know only about my town
and about Homs, but I don’t know about the country.” A village
grocer retorted crisply: "It [Syria’s problems] is none of my busi-
ness. For whom do you take me? Please stop such stupid questions.”
(£69) A male hairdresser, unable to generalize from his personal
unhappiness to die class struggle, is "very unhappy” because "I
am illiterate and so can understand nothing about life. Anodier
thing that makes me unhappy is my inability to teach my only son,
and I can’t find die way how to do tiiis.” He is baffled by public
problems. Asked what he would do as head of the government,
die hairdresser replied: “This can’t be. ... I wouldn’t know what
to do. Even the greatest philosopher can't answer this.” (029)

The Transitionals, in Syria, produce the political types of the
extremist Right and the Middle Left. They include fewer illiter-
ate. destitute and nonparticipant persons than die Apoliticals, but
rather more than the odier types. An interesting reversal occurs

{ 290 ) The Arab Worlds

on place of residence. The Nationalist Right is mainly rural; the
Middle Left mainly urban. As these depressed social groups move
out of the classic apolitical stance of Traditionals, die direction
they take is conditioned by their immediate environment. The
rural peasant tends to adhere to the Right symbolism of national
posture, while the urban laborer is more attracted to the social
class symbolism of the Left. That the Transitional group splits
in this way may follow from Syria’s past political instability-the
cleavage within the elite and the consequent lack of a unifying,
consensus-creating national center.

The cleavage within the elite is reflected in the fairly even dis-
tribution of Modem attributes between the more moderate ele-
ments on both the Left and Right. The profiles exhibited by re-
spondents classified as Conservative Right and Reform Left are
more like each other than like any odiers. ( The Middle Right are
so dose as to be grouped sociologically with the Conservative
Right; the Revolutionary Left, with only six members, must be
discussed separately.) These moderate respondents are the least
illiterate and most educated, the least destitute and most well-off.

Table 3 — Social Attributes of Political Types*

POLITICAL TYPES
LEFT APOLITICALS FIGHT

SOCIAL ATTRIBUTES

Reyo/u-

ffonory

Mid-

die

Re-

form

Ccntcrra-

lira

Attcf-

die

Nation-
a fill

Place of Residence

Urban

50%

67 %

42%

38%

55%

50%

35%

Rural

50

33

58

62

45

50

65

-Education

Illiterate

0

31

13

56

9

16

39

Elementary School

50

43

38

34

25

27

32

High School

17

8

27

5

41

25

16

College

33

18

22

3

25

32

13

Socioeconomic Status

Poor or Destitute

33

62

24

60

18

25

35

Modest

50

23

44

26

42

43

42

Well-off or Rich

17

15

32

14

40

32

23

Media Participation

Read Newspapers

83

45

87

18

87

66

49

See Movies

83

47

73

48

72

68

58

Hear Radio

<57

57

84

50

72

73

68

• Appendix B protean on Independent reelottllicoflon of the Sjrrlen retpondentt according la
fho Empathy Inrfox vjcd Jn Ibo bctlc typology of modernlzoflon. Tho rciwllf *Ho* fb© dor* cof*
rerpondertc© vj|h thl» politico! typology.

Syria: The Lures of Extremism { 291 )

They are by far the most participant in all three media of news-
papers, movies, radio. What unifies these people of similar back-
ground is their personal style of moderation; what divides them
is the secondary symbolism of ideology.

When the moderate elite of a nation is split by doctrinal dis-
sensus, its public fomm tends to be invaded by extremist symbols
from both sides. Only six representatives of the Revolutionary Left
appeared in the 1951 sample of 251 respondents. (This proves
nothing whatsoever about the size of the Syrian G.P. then or now:
political affiliations were not investigated; no special effort was
made to sample C.P. members ; these are usually reluctant, in any
case, to be interviewed under non-Party auspices.) Their socio-
logical profile merely conforms to the analyses, published else-
where by official political observers, that Syrian Communism is
promoted mainly by a middle class intelligentsia: tire Soviet ex-
pert, Mrs. L. M. Vatolina, cites “journalists, writers, artists, law-
yers” as key figures; the U. S. Congressional investigating committee
concluded that “active Communists come mainly from the middle
class, in a few instances from the well-to-do.” 31 What the six cases
show, beyond this, is that both urban and rural Revolutionary Left-
ists are literate (the only type with no illiteracy) and extremely
high media participants.

Tliis, however, may be tire nub of the stoiy. The suggestive
value of these few cases lies in the unanimity of their opinions
and tire intensity with which they are expressed. If ideological
extremism is invading the Syrian political arena, and if media
participation is a channel for diffusing its symbols, then these six
cases may illustrate how this process operates.

Tlus gives us the more comprehensive context needed to ex-
amine pro-Russian attitudes in tire sample. Respondents were classi-
fied as pro-Russian or pro-American according to the answers
they gave when asked their views on the policies and peoples of
these two countries. The ratio of pro-Russians to pro-Americans
was then tabulated in Table 4 for each of the seven political types.

Several features of this distribution are noteworthy. In every
type there is some division of opinion— except that the six Revo-
lutionaries are unanimous. In ever) 7 divided type the pro-Ameri-
cans outnumber the pro-Russians except among the Nationalists.
Even the Middle Left is relatively less pro-Russian than the Ex-
treme Right. Hence, if a line were drawn connecting the pro-

( 292 ) The Arab Worlds

Russian bars for each type, the result would approximate a U-
shaped curve. (Note that the Nationalist Right included the most
non-respondents on these questions. If their unexpressed attitudes
reflect the same ratio as between expressed attitudes, the U-shaped
curve would be more distinct. ) Recent studies have shown that a
U-shaped curve is often a sign of current instability and incipient
change in the attitude so distributed. When the extremes converge
upon the middle from both sides, the middle is likely to shift its
ground— particularly when, as in the present case, the middle is
characterized by moderate measures and the extremes by violence.
The hindsight of 1958 indicates that pro-Russianism has, in fact,
spread since the survey was made. What do the interviews of
1951 reveal about the role of the extremists?

Table 4 — Pro-Russians and Pro-Americans

% 100

Revol.

Middle

Reform

Apoli-

Conserv. Nat'lisl

Middle

Left

Left

left

tical*

Right Right

Right

% pro-

Hip;

% pro- f

I

Russia

America 1

J

NOTE: Percentages were computed by dividing the number of respondents expressing

favorable attitudes by the total number expressing any attitudes.

Taking the extreme Right first, the Nationalistic type was com-
posed of 31 respondents. Table 3 showed them to be mainly poor,
illiterate farmers. Additional data showed that 84% are Muslims,
most of them devout, who live in relative isolation from urban
contacts. These people come closest to fitting the stereotype of
“xenophobic Arab.” They exhibit extreme hostility and aggressive-
ness toward all foreigners. In the aftermath of the Palestine defeat

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( £93 )

tlus was focused on Israel, but included the Western powers as
well. A farm account-keeper, as head of the government would
"unite all the Arabs and endeavor to get Britain and its Jewish
crooks out of all Arab lands because they are corrupting our lives/’
(J55) A woman, who named "war with the Jews” as Syria’s big-
gest problem, called for a war that would restore the national
honor:

It is not difficult because with courage and patriotism nothing is diffi-
cult. . . . [We can help by] encouraging people to enroll ... to enlist
in the Army ... by showing them the beauty of a glorious death. (193)

Another woman would "hate [to live in America] as I hate hell
. . . because they brought us the Jews here.” (278) A fanner, asked
where he would live if he had to leave Syria, answered: “A mil-
lion curses on these and their country, these Jews, these low, un-
civilized people. To live there would be hell for any Arab.” (103)

Such resentment against the West led to pro-Russian attitudes
among Nationalistic respondents aware of the bipolarity in world
politics and determined to make it serve their ends. This readiness
to take extreme, and even violent, measures occurred among those
who expressed Nationalistic ideology with maximum intensity.
Since they gave undisputed priority to Nationalistic goals, they
were ready to subordinate even doctrinal disputes with commu-
nism to achieve these goals. This accounted for their pro-Russian
sentiments, which were animated less by admiration for the
USSR than by animosity toward the West. Following the old
Arab adage of tribal politics— the enemy of my enemy is my friend
—the extreme Nationalists supported the idea of a Syrian alliance
with the Soviets. Some, mainly Arab refugees from Palestine, even
endorsed tire idea of a Communist regime in Damascus. (The
question occurs, in passing, who spread these ideas and how?)
One such refugee stated this extreme position concisely: “I will
fight the Americans who ruined my country and the best way to
fight them is to have this regime of Communism spread every-
where.” (193) Through such a dialectic, some extreme Rightists
found themselves in accord with all extreme Leftists on a general
pro-Russian sentiment

The extreme Leftists, however, arrived at their attitude by quite
another dialectic. Among the Revolutionaries, specific pro-Russian
orientation and general ideology are equivalent The six respond-
ents of tills type included four professionals (two lawyers and

( 294 ) The Arab Worlds

two government clerks), a shopkeeper and a caipetweaver. As the
attitudes of radical intellectuals are more familiar, we look more
closely at the two others. The carpetweaver said: “We live like
animals and see nothing but the loom and poverty.” (022) Unlike
the Apolitical hairdresser, who was unhappy that he could not
educate liis son but had no idea what could be done about it,
the carpetweaver sees the solution of personal misery in terms of
class conflict. Asked the standard final question, what he thought
of such interviews as this, h is hostility erupted at the well-dressed
and highly-educated young interviewer: “Why should you go to
the Universities and study, wliile my children start working at
ten years of age?” This man is not only unhappy and aware that
others are better off, but he is prepared— at least verbally— to do
something about it: '“When the need comes, I will rise up and
with as many as possible, change the government and have a
fair rule for everyone.” The symbolism of Class rather than Nation
consistently motivates the carpetweaver. He would live in Russia
because:

I would choose any country where I am treated and have equal
rights as anybody else. I would choose Russia, because there each is
given all facilities of life and insurance of the family and illness and is
treated in all ways like the most important men.

Similarly, the small shopkeeper says that Syria’s problem is
“Poverty, my poverty and the poverty of my community, with no-
body to care .” (013) He, like the carpetweaver, differs from others
who complain of personal deprivations by his intense involvement
and violent prescriptions. The shopkeeper would “hang all those
who have been ruling in the last ten years and take their lands
and distribute them among the needy.” He would live in Russia
because:

I prefer to live any place where the proletariat class is ruling . . .
because it is then democratic and the majority is ruling . . . and there
are no poor people.

The Communist representation of the world has reached, these
men. They see Russia as an egalitarian social system, and America
as a class society which oppresses the poor: “[America] is a country
where a few live at the expense of 130 million people, so 1 don’t
want to he one of these poor victims.” When they criticize Ameri-
can foreign policy they use the Communist slogans of anti-imperial-
ism, not the anti-Israel slogans of the Rightists.

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 295 )

The impact of class symbols diffused by such forthright and
vigorous spokesmen of embattled poverty as the carpehveaver
and shopkeeper can be great. In each type, there are some re-
spondents who express pro-Russian attitudes. On the Left, this
is often an aggrieved proletarian or artisan who has begun to seek
political solutions for his personal problems. In such cases the idea
that there is a Russian balm for Syrian hurts is clearly defined.
But a similar idea has appeared also among the impoverished work-
ers and peasants of the Right Said one pro-Russian hotel worker
of the Nationalistic type: “Russia is good for the poor like me.
Everyone finds work there and can live. It is far away, but if one
is taken there, he can work.” (295) A peasant woman of the same
political type said:

I think I heard of this country’ ... a man told us there was a country
called Russia who helped the poor, where there are no rich people.
. . . J hear this country helped the poor, so I love her because she
feels with us. (194)

We note that the hotel worker, though a Nationalist, speaks "for
the poor like me.” The peasant woman mentions that “a man told
us . . .” Who was “the man”? Who were “us”?

For "telling” such people through the traditional channels of
oral communication, the articulate carpehveaver and shopkeeper
mako excellent relays. Moreover, as Table 3 showed, media par-
ticipation has spread among the political types. Only the Apoliti-
cal fail to show a majority of participants in all tliree media.
Elsewhere, media participation and political involvement have
grown together. Tlu's has transformed the situation as of 1924, on
which Professor Hitti has provided expert testimony: "The Syrian
is the man without a country par excellence. His patriotism takes
tiie form of love for family and sect [and] has no political aspects.
. . . Radicalism has no votaries among this people. Very few of
them interest themselves in politics.” A generation later politiza-
tion has increased and, abetted by the media, both nationalist
and radical symbols have their votaries.

Whether they are turning Right or Left, the Apolitical ranks
seem to be thinning. The process is slow because few established
parties have recruited diem. Even the Communists and the Ba'ath
have believed, in Houranis words, diat fellahin and laborers “are
too unenlightened to have much effective sense of grievance or

( 296 ) The Arab Worlds

capacity for political or economic combination /’ 82 This estimate
doubtless has been right, but the data show that the situation is
changing. Although some Traditionals stolidly accept their depriva-
tion, others are being stirred out of their ancient lethargy and are
caught up in the new ideological currents. As yet, political atti-
tudes do not appear to have formalized into political organizations.
The types reported here, in any case, do not correspond with party
affiliations. The types represent, rather, a fund of latent political
sentiments which remain to be articulated in political action. The
prospects, judged from the record of the past decade, are not
bright for those who prefer modernization through rational plan-
ning rather than violent change.

4. The Politics of Insecurity

Syria’s odyssey in the decade since independence exemplifies
the degeneration of politics into violence. Although parliamentary
government was formally interrupted for only three years, at no
time did the Chamber of Deputies have much weight in the actual
process of decision. A series of external struggles provided the
substance of the parliamentary shadow play. The struggle be-
tween forces seeking to align Syria with Egypt or with Iraq was
primary; its other face was the Great Power competition for Middle
East influence. Interlocked were the complex plots to draw blood-
revenge from Israel in a “second round”; the conflict between
landlord-merchant elite and army reformers for domestic control;
and the increasingly complicated competition between parties,
factions, and extremist groups of the Right and Left. Minimum
stability has been imposed through government by coups d’etat,
Lacking a unified elite to administer it, or a genuine constituency
to be administered, national power became the object of palace
politics amid popular apathy. The public role was played by staged
demonstrations instead of voluntary participation. This led to
the violent consequences described by Professor Lasswell in gen-
eral terms:

Where means of peaceful influencing are not at hand, and depriva-
tions are widespread, attempts at enforcing accountability are likely to
end in coercion, whether in the form of assassination, uprising, sabotage,
or civil disobedience. 33

The decade passed through three phases— breakdown of civil
government; military rule with interludes of civilian cooperation;

Syria: The Lures of Extremism { 297 )

restoration of the ancien regime with the cue-giving military hover-
ing in the wings. As in Iran, open destruction of the constitutional
facade made representative government, when restored, even more
precarious than it had been. Syria, after the spate of military dic-
tatorships, was ruled by an old elite more discredited than ever.
Huge social sores bad been made visible to the public eye, thence-
forth to be less passively accepted. Extremist attitudes flourished.
The current (195S) scene reflects the ascendancy of extremism.
To see how Syria got where it is, we summarize the three phases
of the past decade.

Phase 1: Breakdown of Civil Government. The Arab defeat in
Palestine catalyzed military revolutions in both Syria and Egypt—
where elite corruption and conservatism had already alienated the
politically aware. A basic error of propaganda strategy compounded
the effects of the Palestine war. The Syrian press never reported
Arab reversals, but confidently predicted the speedy liquidation
of Israel. 8 * The public was completely unprepared when the Arab
defeat could no longer be suppressed, particularly as hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian refugees poured in from tire south. When
a propaganda strategy of deception is caught up by reality, the
boomerang can be disastrous. 35

Tie March 1949 coup detat of Colonel Husni al-Za‘im sought
to vindicate the army’s role in Palestine, placing the onus for defeat
on civilian venality. 30 A further aim was to forestall a plan for
merger with Iraq that distraught President Shukri al-Kuwatli,
faced with town riots and parliamentary crises, favored. The army’s
assertion of power met with popular approval and the enthusiastic
backing of the disaffected intelligentsia. 37 But before the year was
out, both Za'im and his successor had been removed and executed.
A third military dictator. Colonel Adib Shishakli, stepped up to
interpret the "irresistible will of the people” until such time as they
had acquired sufficient "political sophistication” to be “entrusted
with power.” 38

Phase 2: The Army in Control. The longest and most significant
postwar military regime was that of Colonel Shishakli, who ruled
from spring 1949 until February 1954. His regime reflected the
ardent nationalism, the vaguely-articulated reformism, the deep-
rooted authoritarianism of the young effendis— whom it pleased by
launching an excoriating attack on the displaced eh'te. Its major
policy statements (issued by his front-man. General Fawzi Selo)
denounced die old politicians as “hardhearted oppressors” who

( 298 ) The Arab Worlds

had “pampered the whims and desires of factious groups and
parties . . . making the winning of a cheap popularity their only
motive and not caring in the least for the terrible price that had
to be paid/’ 30 The Army was pledged to “work for the transforma-
tion of Syria into a modem and progressive country in which there
shall be no master and no slave but absolute justice and assured
freedom.” 40

Between the vision and the achievement of an apocalypse lie
many pitfalls, particularly if speed is essential and planning is
inept. The tempo of social change in Syria has always been
leisurely— e.g., the cadastral survey for land reforni was started
in 1923; thirty years later it was half completed. 41 Said Shishakli:
“Our reform needs to be done quickly.” Out of his offices poured
hundreds of reform decrees that quickly transformed Syria-on
paper. No sense of historical sequence guided this regime. A plan
to engage a Spanish musician, to elevate the musical taste of
Syrians, jostled decrees abolishing parties and regulating the civil
service. 42 No knowledge of governing technique tempered the
belief (which our interviews found prevalent among the Syrian
intelligentsia) that reform can be decreed by a military dictator.

Shishakli’s proposed reforms threatened to destroy utterly the
landlord-merchant oligarchy. Plans to distribute among landless
fellahin the state domain held illegally by powerful landowners,
to impose a progressive income tax, and to organize agricultural
credit— all these decreed simultaneously— caused landowners and
others fearful of radical change to close ranks in opposition. Against
this show of unity, Shishakli lacked the communication resources
to mobilize effective support by persuasion when coercion alone
was no longer enough to save him and his program. Although
dubbed the Syrian Atatiirk by impressionable foreign observers,
Shishakli failed to emulate the Turkish dictator in communication
techniques. Professor Khadduri has observed:

[Arab army leaders] failed to understand that the Kemalist regime
was not established overnight, by entrusting power to the military, but
that Kemal from the beginning made it clear to his fellow army officers
that they had to choose between the army and politics. He launched
his social reforms in the formative period by democratic methods, spend-
ing endless hours in trying to persuade his opponents, displaying pa-
tience and tolerance rarely to be found among statesmen with a military
background. 43

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 299 )

Atatuxk, who did not hesitate to use force when tactically
necessary, knew how to use argument, propaganda, education
and speeches (his six-day speech to the Grand National Assembly
in 1927 was only an extension of liis usual procedure). Shishaldi
had little thought for the “endless hours” needed to persuade
political waverers and opponents. He approached the public rarely
and “only under formal circumstances surrounded by the panoply
of the Army.” w Seeking to exercise absolute power without accept-
ing popular responsibility, he failed on both counts. To avoid
the taint of personal aggrandizement (which had contributed to
Za'im's downfall) he represented himself as the “neutral pivot”
in a society ridden by dissension— requiring the support of all
moderates and reserving to himself only the ultimate sanction.
But the logic of politics finally forced him to manifest his power
overtly by dissolving Parliament, abolishing parties (except for
his Arab Liberation Movement) and revising the Constitution.
Like his two predecessors, he reinforced Syrian disillusion with
Western institutions by cynically manipulating the forms of free
government

At the time of the interviews, Shishakli had not yet dissolved
Parliament. But our respondents correctly assumed that the army,
not the politicians, were in control and already there was resent-
ment. By “gangster techniques” he was eliminating rivals and
creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty (of which, after
a score of assassination attempts, he was as much victim as
creator), 15 An interviewer in northern Syria wrote:

I heard that after I had finished this interview rumors started to go
around that I belong to F.B.I. looking for Communists. Others said I
want to take their sons to Korea. The atmosphere is not calm at all in
this area. , . . Although I had explained the matter and purpose of
the interview, yet people were very skeptical about it. And any time
the name of any big power or the name of their government is men-
tioned, you feel that they are not at ease and give short, dry answers.
This is the attitude I met with most of the non-educated class. (271)

In Damascus, reportedly riddled by petty spies and informers,
such feelings were also widespread among the educated inter-
viewees.

Like Nasser, Shishakli longed for “serried ranks” as he led
Syria toward his version of the future. Instead, faced with chaotic
opposition from a volatile people, his increasing repressions only

( 300 ) The Arab Worlds

stiffened resistance. Students, refugees and workers staged recur-
rent mob demonstrations; civil servants struck for higher pay;
the parties, the press, the landlord associations and the Muslim
Brethren sought to undermine his position. Nationalist gestures
—such as rejection of foreign aid— failed to placate the articulate
sections of the public. Finally, Damascus lawyers, Homs students,
and Druze tribesmen (acting separately) prepared the way for
the Army revolt that overthrew Shishakli. 40

Phase 3: The Aftermath. After Shishakli was deposed (and his
constitution, party and collaborators eliminated) the old power
elite resumed control, first under 89-year-old Hashim Atassi, then
with Shukri al-Kuwatli in the Presidency he had held five years
earlier. The post-Shishakli period has been characterized by
feverish alignments in the Arab and bipolar arenas. Presidential
elections, assassinations of notables, massings of demonstrators
have occurred in an atmosphere of xenophobic insecurity and
governmental instability.

Communist growth was one of the unwitting accomplishments
of the Shishakli regime. In the 1954 elections (the fairest ever
held) decay of the two older parties was evident in their failure
to win more than 45 out of 142 seats. Independent deputies,
tending to be neutralist in foreign policy and obstructionist in
domestic politics, were in the majority. The radical parties, gaining
support among the officer corps, scored impressively with 16%
of the seats. The most portentous result was the election of the
head of the Communist Party, the first official Communist deputy
in the Arab world and “one of the most forceful and influential
members of the Chamber.” 47 This stimulated die persistent in-
filtration of Communists into radical parties and army officer
circles; it helped to spread an array of front organizations “for
practically all academic professions, writers, artists, women and
youth organizations.” A Soviet expert considers Syria as the Arab
country most likely to go Communist by means of an internal
coup. 48

Intellectuals provide the backbone of Communist organization.
Since the Syrian bourgeoisie is regarded as a necessary (although
unreliable) ally at the present stage of Communist development,
class-struggle themes are muted and nationalist goals emphasized.
This encourages disillusioned young effendis, including the army
officers, to seek Communist comfort for their despair with con-

Syria: The Lures of Extremism ( 301 )

temporary Syria. The Communist Party, the best organized party
in Syria today, indoctrinates the educated groups through four
dailies and a host of other publications. These groups become
its oral relay for wider diffusion of the Communist message. 40

The future of Syrian politics hinges on the Communist cam-
paign to broaden its social base. In the past, traditional peasants
and laborers were bypassed by the Marxist effendis. A 1951
report to the Central party command said:

Nearly 75% of [Party] activity, whether in propaganda, organizing
or daily work, has been confined to petty bourgeois elements in cities
and villages on the one hand and selected workers on the other. . . .
But the broad masses of workers and fellahin -have received hardly any
attention. 00

The tactical necessity of bourgeois participation, it continued,
must not obscure the ultimate aim of “mass organizations of a
peasant character, i.e., composed of the peasants themselves.” The
psychic hurdles confronting Syrian Communists were illustrated:

Our comrades in certain rural districts misunderstood, and when they
were told to strive to organize mass movements ... of fellahin under
the nnmc of “The Salvation of the Fellah,” they began to constitute in
the city a committee of intellectuals . . . and called it “The Committee
for the Salvation of the Fellah.” They did not understand that the main
aim of fellah organization is to organize the fellahin themselves and
attract their broad masses to the struggle for their demands against the
feudalists and the government.

Communist success in mobilizing the hitherto apolitical masses
remains problematic. In 1951, disbelief in the fellahin’s capacity
to enter the political arena was common among Syrian intellectuals.
One respondent, a rich 24-year-old A.U.B. graduate, summarized
his experience in the Ba'ath party, which has backed radical land
reform and recruited peasants, in these words:

The people who should revolt against the land-tenure system are
illiterate and don t know anything about the conditions under which
they are living. They do not have any idea about social, political and
economic equality. They take everything as being the will of God. (044)

The interviews with these Traditionals suggest, as we showed
curlier, that their historic nonparticipation has been changing
rapidly. It was natural that the urban intelligentsia, who rarely
mingle with the fellahin and unskilled laborers, should in 1951

( 302 ) The Arab Worlds

have underestimated the extent to which political issues have
diffused among die masses. Responsible leaders of radical parties
are not likely to make this error today. In the current situation
extremists can take heart,

o 0 0

In March 1958, when I revisited Syria, the United Arab Re-
public was newly installed and Syrian extremism had taken another
turn under Egyptian guidance. Nasser’s official brand of Arab Na-
tionalism was in command and the leader of Syrian Communism,
Khalid Bakdash, had departed hastily for Moscow, where he re-
mains. A prominent banker in Damascus told me: “So long as it’s
only politics diat’s involved, the new setup is fine. We must be
careful not to attempt any brusque changes in the economics of
our countries. After all, the Egyptians are not very intelligent in
these matters. Their economy must be run by the central govern-
ment; ours flourishes under private management. If we do not try
to change things too fast, the new Union may work out.”

An important merchant said: “We could do with a little less
politics in Syria for a while. Maybe now tire students will go to
their classes at the University occasionally and normal commerce
will become possible.” A Christian university coed told me, as I
was leaving Damascus: “I hate it here,- I’d rather be in Beirut.
A woman is so restricted here. Nothing is changed by this new
politics.”

A transitory visitor could hardly agree that “nothing” had
changed. What remained the same was the problem of maintaining
tempo and balance in the changes everywhere visibly occurring.
Could Nasser solve the thorny problems of Syrian extremism— could
he provide mobility for the young effendis while maintaining sta-
bility in the society?— this was the great question. He had clearly,
since 1957, improved the odds by ranging Syrian extremism within
a more unified cadre behind a stronger leader. The new question
was: Would they stay there?

IX.

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples

"Who taught you tender Bible tales
Of honey-lands, of milk and wine?

Of happy, peaceful Palestine?

Of Jordan’s holy harvest vales?”

—Joaquin Miller

"Look at the Palestinians. They listened to tho radio
and God destroyed them.”

—A Transjordanian

JORDAN is an ancient world, a pre-Biblical world of
which the psalmist wrote: "The sea saw that, and fled; Jordan
was driven back.” ( Psalms CX1V.3 ) Jordan was still "back,” with
Arabia and The Yemen, in a desert universe when the interviewers
made their rounds in 1951. Jordan did not share the problems
imposed upon her neighbors by the modem world; Jordan’s prob-
lems had been imposed upon her by them. While their neighbors
puzzled over the problems of shaping an Arab-Muslim syndrome
into an instrument of Middle East policy, Jordanians were puzzled
by their neighbors. Transjordanian tribesmen could not grasp the
"Arab-Muslim” idea: what else was there? The “Middle East”
idea was no easier: where else was there? Even the idea of "neigh-
bors” meant, in their normal usage, only the nearest tribe or the
next village.

This desert fief suddenly found itself cast in the role of a
modem nation, and the role had to he played under conditions
of extraordinary' difficulty. The defeat by Israel had brought over
800,000 Palestinians into Jordan, trebling the population within
its new borders. About half of this new population (400,000) lived
in tbe West Bank area once earmarked as part of the state of Arab
Palestine. Another 475,000 were listed on UNRWA rolls as refugees

(303 )

( 304 ) The Arab Worlds

from Israel; these dispersed themselves over the East Bank areas
—about 30% in camps, 32% in villages, and 38% in towns. 1 With this
influx, ancient Transjordan abruptly entered the modem world
as the turbulent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

The more numerous and advanced Palestinian population,
superimposed upon a backward people in a terrain whose poor
resources were virtually unmapped, raised problems which might
be capable of solution, but neither compelling plans nor adequate
means were ready at hand. How could economic viability he
created among this mixed mass? How could some measure of po-
litical stability be maintained? A long-range policy sequence, sus-
tained over a period of years, would be required to work out reason-
able solutions. Meanwhile, getting a start was impeded by the acute
problem of “culture contact” between two peoples who, while
both Arab and Muslim, were foreign and hostile to each other.
The urban Palestinians regarded the desert Transjordanians as
unspeakably backward, and were regarded in turn as impious and
effete products of the degenerate city. One Beduin whose ignor-
ance of the world outside the desert was total, when asked by the
interviewer what he would like to know about foreign countries,
responded: “Do they live like us or like ‘Amman?”

1. “Culture Contact”:

The Setting of Social Change

Jordans population is two-thirds Palestinian, but 94% of its
territory is Transjordanian. These proportions suggest the challenge
of integration that faces the new nation. The task of “Jordanizing
is beset with difficulty and doubt, since a historical as well as a
geologic divide has long separated the East and West Banks
(formerly Transjordan and Palestine respectively). Narrower
"Palestinian” and wider “Arab” identities continue to rival Jor-
danian allegiance. Jordan, lacking an autonomous tradition, having
existed always as a fief under Syrian, Egyptian or Ottoman rule,
has no magnetic symbolism for Palestinians. “At no time in the
Arab period,” writes Professor Hitti, “did it achieve distinction
in any realm of endeavor.” 2 The establishment of Transjordan
(originally included in the Palestine mandate) as a separate en-
tity in 1923 was dictated not by indigenous need but by French
and British jockeying for Middle East power. Its borders, said

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 305 )

some Arab nationalists, “violated every known law of physical
and human demarcation.” 3 Although the principality achieved
political stability under Amir ‘Abdullah, and even formal inde-
pendence of Britain in 1946-48, culturally it remained a vassal of
{lie surrounding Arab countries. Its films, broadcasts, and printed
matter, its music and other forms of folk art, were imported from
Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. 4 The few Transjordanians who sought
higher education went to other Arab or to Western centers. The
educated elite— government officials, the professional class, and
indeed the monarch himself— were imported from the neighboring
states. Disgruntled nationalists since the 1930s moved from Da-
mascus, Jerusalem, Beirut and Cairo to ‘Amman, which became
known as the Mecca of Arab Nationalism. Their ranks were aug-
mented by Palestinians invited into the administration by the
British. 6

This thin elite layer did not touch the static society of fellahin
and nomads that made up mandatory Transjordan, whose rela-
tive insulation from change was structured and certified by its
ecology. East of the Hijaz Railway the sod gives way to the sand
that surfaces four-fifths of the land. A 1944 estimate classified
half (lie population as camel-breeding Beduin or as goat and sheep-
raising semi-nomads. c Even among the settled population, also
of nomadic stock, tribal tradition remains stronger than elsewhere
in the Fertile Crescent. Social institutions were unaltered by
British governance— with the major exception of measures taken
to ensure public safety and order, particularly from Beduin ma-
rauding. While antiquated Ottoman codes were gradually being
replaced by modem legislation on the British models of common
law and equity across the Jordan River in Palestine, here they
remained in force. 7 While the Palestinian struggle continuously
pushed both Jews and Arabs in tire direction of modernization,
Transjordan remained untouched by social changes. Indigenous
opposition to ‘Abdullah’s benevolent autocracy and the finn pater-
nalism of British administrators was nearly nonexistent. The hardy
Communists and labor organizers who ventured to set up shop in
Transjordan, invariably agents from the surrounding countries,
made little headway before the merger of 1948-50.®

In production of literates and urbanites Transjordan lagged
behind its neighbors— rather deliberately. "Social stability was
prized above education,” noted the RIIA survey. 9 After two dec-

( 306 } The Arab Worlds

ades of British rule, schools enrolled about 28% of school-age chil-
dren— as compared to 52% of Palestine Arabs. The pupils were
mainly town boys, minority children were much more numerous
than Sunni Arabs, and the nomadic boys were hardly reached at
all. No more than 20% of the population lived in the four towns
of 10,000 or more, and even these settlements comprised rural
people to a considerable extent. 10 Compartmentalized into tight
“quarters,” the towns functioned “as if they were a number of
villages bordering upon one another.” 11 A working class hardly
existed, apart from the small cadres trained as pipeline workers
for the Iraq Petroleum Company or as aides to the British armed
forces.

Jordan is an impoverished land. Primary is the shortage of
water. People cluster in the arable area: 56% live on the crowded
West Bank (6% of the total area), raising density per square kilo-
meter to 580 compared with 107 in East Jordan. 12 In ratio of
population to cropped area, Jordan is “one of the most densely
settled of the agrarian countries.” Present methods of cultivation
are extremely extensive, with little investment of capital and labor,
and with land left fallow every three years. 13 But to intensify and
rationalize cultivation is a long-term process, and it is immediate
absorption that poses the crucial political problems. With good
reason, some respondents considered that lack of natural resources
had permanently decided the country’s fate. Beyond scarce land
and water, the mineral base for industry is also lacking. The 153
establishments existing in 1950 were mainly in the handicraft stage,
employing just a few persons. Plans for new industries (cement
plant, petroleum refinery, textile plant, tannery, soap factories)
were inactivated by lack of capital, poverty of the domestic market,
difficulty of access to external markets and political instability.
Foreign specialists regard a development program as exceed-
ingly difficult; to many Jordanians the prospects are utterly hope-
less. 14

Into this traditional environment surged the Palestinian refu-
gees, among Arab peoples second to none in degree of modernity.
Before partition, 30 to 40% of the 1.3 million Palestine Arabs were
urbanized. 10 A large labor force had developed in the great centers
of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, during the 1930’s and subsequent
war years. Over 25,000 Arab industrial workers had been organ-
ized into the more than 30 unions active before partition. 10 Villagers

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 307 )

constantly swelled the urban corps, pulled by job opportunities,
pushed by growing population pressure on the land (the Pales-
tinian Muslims had the highest known birth rate in the world,
54/1000). Hence “possibly 50 % of the earners” among the Pales-
tinians had some acquaintance with nonfarming occupations. 17

Jordan alone among the Arab states gave the Palestinians citi-
zenship and the right to work, but it could not provide an eco-
nomic basis for re-establishing their lives. The refugees continued,
year after year, to be indigestible. Initially, the international com-
munity assumed responsibility for feeding and sheltering destitute
newcomers, and well-to-do refugees brought assets that doubled
the total Jordanian money supply (currency plus bank deposits).
A building boom started which still impresses the cursory traveler
through 'Amman with a sense of growth and excitement. But these
beneficial short-range effects have not altered the long-range prog-
nosis. Despite large international expenditures, the absorptive ca-
pacity of Jordan has barely risen during these past few years.

But if the refugees have not raised economic supply, they have
significantly increased political demands. Traditional evasiveness
by the elite is hard to maintain. Demands for accountability are
growing in a society which hitherto provided no channels for pop-
ular participation. A poor, illiterate farmer— who has learned to
listen to international broadcasts— told his interviewer about Jor-
dan’s great national problems: "We do not have good roads, mod-
em machines for agriculture, doctors, clinics and clean water.”
Then he added: "Every day I hear of new plans but never saw
them in action.” (126)

To determine the internal proportions of the Jordan sample,
we sorted all interviewees into the Modem, Transitional and Tra-
ditional categories of our basic typology of modernization. The
results, given in Table 1, show a consistently greater modernity
of refugee Palestinians over indigenous Jordanians. The refugees
are proportionately better educated, more urban, more active
media consumers, and more widely empathic than the nonrefugees.
A profound shock which the refugees applied to Jordanian polity
was their capacity to consume and manipulate public communica-
tion. On media behavior, 05 % of the refugees, compared to 50%
oF the nonrefugees, were "high” scorers on the Exposure Index.
This index is based on frequency of newspaper reading, radio
istening and movie going. The range is from zero (no exposure

( 308 ) The Arab Worlds

to any media) to 12 (daily exposure to newspaper and radio, and
weekly attendance at the cinema). Scores over 7 were scored
“high”; under 7 ‘low.” Since Refugees were usually destitute new
arrivals, and Nonrefugees include Palestinians who retained their
homes on the West Bank, the difference between Palestinians and
Transjordanians are greater in actuality than shown by the division
of the sample in Table 1.

Table 7 — Modernity: Refugees and Nonrefugees

No.

%of

Refuged in
Each Typo

% of Typo
Composed of
Refugees

No.

%of % of Type

Nonrefugees Compored cf
in Each Type Nonrefujftj

Traditional:

29

22

30

68

43

70

Transitional:

24

18

48

26

17

52

Moderns

63

48

54

53

34

46

Unclassified

15

12

60

10

6

40

Totals

131

100

157

100

-

NOTEi If "Refugee:" and "NonrefuBoei" were sortod Into ‘'Palestinians" and Jordonioni,
the proportion of Palestinian Moderns would probably bo about 20% higher than the 54 /o ™
Refugees.

Widespread social changes resulted from the commingling of
the two groups. Among these are high unemployment (officially
estimated at one-fourth of the male labor force), widespread under-
employment in the towns and on the land, and the sharp drop in
wage levels. The rapid growth of towns is another example. Today,
Jordan is at least 35 % urbanized. 18 The West Bank towns swelled
with the influx of refugees from coastal Palestine. But the East
Bank towns have grown as well— notably the astonishing expansion
of ‘Amman from a town of 30,000 (in which 37$ of dwellings were
temporary structures, tents and caves in 1952) to a metropolis o
200,000. Of the new ‘Amman residents 75-80,000 are refugees, hut
the majority are indigenous rural migrants. 19

Variations of town life in Jordan are striking. The two genuine
cities are ‘Amman and Arab Jerusalem. A few West Bank towns
resemble the modem Lebanese pattern. Christian Ramallab, f° T
example, has the highest literacy in Jordan (80-85$); many of its
youth study abroad; many commute to work in Jerusalem; there
are seven welfare agencies, good housing, and two movie theatres.
At the other end of the scale is Karak, on the fringe of the Eastern
desert, where the single street offers few urban amenities, and the
settled tribes easily maintain their traditions and clan loyalties.

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 309 )

In general, "the Jordanian town appears a straight-laced, sober,
and dull place which has lost much of the simple beauty and charm
of the 'village without either gaining the conveniences, advantages,
enticements or acquiring the vices of the city ” 20

Media development also reflects the poverty of Jordanian re-
sources and the difficulty of balanced growth. In 1951 Jordan had
17 cinemas (10 of these in 'Amman and Jerusalem) with a total
seating capacity of 8,000 or about six seats per thousand inhabitants.
In 1953-54, UNESCO reported 24 cinemas (six of them open-air,
functioning only during the summer) with seats for 12,000, raising
the capacity per thousand to nine. Despite its efforts at growth,
Jordan is still considerably behind every other country in our
survey: e.g., Lebanon, with the same population, had 30,000 seats
in 60 cinemas. The 700 films shown annually are all imported—
457 from die United States, 30% from Egypt and 15% from Eng-
land, 51

Radio, likewise, is growing but still limited. Before 1949 there
was no broadcasting service in the country'. Jordan acquired the
important transmitter at Bamallah during the war with Israel (al-
though its studios, located in Jerusalem's New City, were taken
over by Israel). The interviews were made in 1951, before the
new transmitter was established in 'Amman, when only Ramallah
was functioning with a broadcast schedule limited to eight hours
daily. This effectively left the field to interested foreign powers,
notably Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs (after the 1952 coup in Egypt),
which with increasing boldness sought to replace British by Egyp-
tian predominance in Jordan. The ‘Amman station was designed
for defense against this insistent and effective propaganda cam-
paign. Before 1948, there were only 2,000 licensed receivers in
Jordan-or five per thousand persons. The most recent estimate is
14,000 receivers, or 10 per thousand— but, despite die doubling,
still the lowest Arab figure in the survey. Some villages and refu-
gee camps are now equipped with loudspeakers for communal
listening, hut private sets generally are found in the larger towns.
About one-third of all sets are in 'Amman, another 11% in Jerusalem.
This distribution reflects die refugee situation; many of them had
to abandon radios in flight and cannot afford new ones. 22

Among mass media, the press reaches the largest audience,
averaging 12 dailies per thousand persons. In our sample, which
overrepresented urban literate males, an extremely high 44% read

( 310 ) The Arab Worlds

dailies. Palestinians, as expected, were more devoted to the press
than Transjordanians. While almost half the nonrefugees never
read a paper, only a quarter of the Palestinians go without printed
news; about half claim to read a newspaper daily and the others
several times weekly. By its Palestine annexation, Jordan fell heir
to some of the oldest and most respected papers in the Arab world.
Falastin, founded in 1911, and al-Difaa, founded in 1933, trans-
ferred their offices from Jaffa to the Old City of Jerusalem, In 1944
‘Amman housed one weekly, which actually appeared intermittently
(a daily produced in 1939 had meanwhile folded), and the merger
stimulated publication of a daily. But in 1950 the Jerusalem press
still accounted for most of the daily circulation. In the press, as
in radio and cinema, Jordanian dependence upon Egypt, Syria and
Lebanon (as well as the West) is evident. The Amman office of
Egypt’s Arab News Agency is its principal source of news; foreign
broadcasts are monitored for the balance of the articles. Literate
Jordanians still prefer newspapers, magazines and books from the
more advanced Arab countries to the local product. Roza al-Yusuj,
a sensational Egyptian weekly, “has the largest circulation . . .
and has been nicknamed the ‘School of Politics’ in Jordan. 23

Before 1948, the small knots of political malcontents could ex-
press their dissent only in radical sheets published abroad.* 4 With
acquisition of the Palestine papers, whose editors were consumed
by a burning irredentist issue and hostility to the Jordanian elite,
political journalism took a new turn. ‘Abdullah retaliated by sus-
pending and banning newspapers, punishing editors and corre-
spondents, under cover of the most restrictive press laws, as of
1951-52, in all the Arab countries. Application for a newspaper li-
cense could be arbitrarily rejected even though all legal require-
ments were met; administrative suspension was used, with terms
unlimited by law. 25 The International Press Institute reported drat
censorship was very severe for local correspondents and stringers,
“incalculable but not very stringent” for foreign correspondents*
But foreign publications were subject to censorship. At the height
of his bitter struggle with the Arab League in 1949, ‘Abdullah
banned six Egyptian newspapers from his territory. 27

Censorship led editors to abandon or reduce editorials. Instead,
their views figured in selection and slanting of news reports, It
was sometimes hard to distinguish between reporting of what ought
to be and what was. Thus, a wishful surmise reporting Israels

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 311 )

cession of Rnmlch, Lydda, and Jaffa was published as a fact
Likewise, the refugee's hopes for repatriation were fanned with
false information. Such tactics prompted a well-to-do social worker
to declare that papers “poison people’s minds and mislead public
opinion.” (106) Similarly, a college-educated refugee stated that if
he were editor of a newspaper

l'II suggest to publish the news correctly as they receive it and not
to deceive the public for the purpose of more sales. (050, Administrative
Officer in Chamber of Commerce)

But some Jordanians valued the partisan press, preferring con-
current opinion to distasteful information, even if distorted news
was a by-product. A young refugee restaurant owner, educated
at the American University of Beirut, said:

The people are as a majority ignorant and they need someone to
explain and show them what to do. . . . The government is despotic
and so if the editor is bold it needs him badly so as to awaken those
that still have a little consciousness in the government and maybe some
good will come out some day. (015)

Many advocates of a crusading press were Palestinians, long ac-
customed to newspapers active in political struggles against the
mandatory regime. When rumors had ‘Abdullah signing a separate
peace with Israel, a violent press campaign was credited with
reversing the king’s policy. One respondent, “a very important
officer in the Ministry of Education,” stated:

When the people thought that the King wanted to conclude peace
with the Jews and the editorial appeared die next morning the people
were so enraged diat the cabinet had to resign. ... It is very pleasing
to $ec the people force their way through in that way. (014)

Jordanian politics, since this official was interviewed, has wit-
nessed the increasing potency of popular demonstrations against
established authority, led by organized extremist blocs. Before the
merger, ‘Abdullah ruled arbitrarily and any check on his power
derived less from public opinion than from British representatives
m Amman. Provisions for representative government were ignored.
It was impossible even to bribe one’s way into office against the
royal will. Colonel F. G. Peake, former head of the Arab Legion,
recalled a defeated candidate in tbe 1926 elections “complaining
itterly that he had given over £400 to the voters and yet failed
to get elected. I knew but could not tell him, that he never would

( 312 )

The Arab Worlds

, nTUO worlds

° f ta°poweS« POlitiCai “ t0 those

bated by the W^-poliUdzerPafe^Jns 11 ^ 66 ” stea, % Ml-
by diplomacy and intra-Arab facHoS loo 6 fasirafio,

tempt for governmental authoriL toT • Ped their »
opposition. By applying these f Jo? • ^ VJSlveness > their skill in
unrlprmmnri V( g toese techniques to Tordaninn .

few months ^ ***** ^

Of al-Husayni (the faSef Si of T bya “**

Palestinian hostih'ty toward the Has/ ^ ’ re ^ ecter ^ deep
government auditor, who ctsife ed “ft A J**»

pubhc affairs” as Jordan’s gravest probltm raid* "

If X *

King's interference. He ^ Affine 6 ™ a 6 !! 1, I WOultl put m 1“ the
every administrative measure by S the ptli^ent (tof) ‘° in ' erfereil

government "were i/nerTd'*/ PaIesHnians into the dom«lfc
Hnsaynis (fc®S by ? is fe ™ritism toward the auB-
Jar), W Tu ? n Cam in panic

to come to terms with Israel * As ^ by h* 8 ' rf,in S"® !

merit, the dissident pH t . Assi SPed one-haff the raats in Parlta-
representation. Shortly aftpr”^ 5 cIamored for fu]1 proportional
precipitated a narliamen. f survey, the Palestinian deputies
Cabinet be made resnoS wben domanded that the
(a demand met in the 1952 ^ ° ^ arliament rather than the King
ullahs death) Thev t ,-u ° nstltu tion promulgated after ‘Abd-
of which 65% went for nT* demanded revision of the budget,
of the royal household 30 6 arm ^ and P°h* c e, 20% for maintenance

vis-a-vis the West and^ 11 ^^ 85 ^ , pus ^ ed Jordan toward extremism
radical politics reflected Z ’ ^ t0Ward mob rale at W Their
of lawful change This cti * e . S f >read ^ belief in the possibility
there anything people lik* ^ Wh< f res P ond ents were asked: “ Is
the nation as a whole faces 0 ?” pTl S ° Ive . th ® biggest problem
requently than native Tnrrla • esdnians saj ’ d “No” much more
questions of this type Sinee 1 m ^ ns ~J nore than twice as often on
the Palestinians placed cmr ^ a ^don seemed to them ineffectual,

use of force. In answering beavier reliance on the

nswermg questions as to what should be done

Jordan: One State tvith Two Peoples { 313 )

al>aut the various public problems they had named, they tended
much more frequently to endorse violent solutions. Of those who
named Israel as a problem, 34% refugees compared with 13%
conrefugees spontaneously advocated military action against Israel.
As propensities toward extremism are focused by Israel, it is im-
portant that, when asked to identify die greatest problem facing
Jordan, large proportions of all respondents named Israel. To per-
mit comparison with the other Arab countries. Table 2 reports
these results in our basic typological categories.

Table 2 — Priority of “ Palestine Problem"

Troditlonafs

TrartsUlonaU

Modtmr

tgypi

2%

7%

3%

Itbonon

5

—

3

Syria

19

28

17

lotion

45

56

53

Rtfi/g e#«* 76% 63% 57%

Nonr«firg»e»* 32 50 47

• If tb«r» Group* were recodud Of "Pololtinlani" ond "Jordanian*" Iho difference* between
ifwn voold probably be Increoied by 20%. The high Syrian figure!, relative lo Egypt and Lebanon,
c'ro r«!»tl the pretence of Paleillnlan refugees.

Advocates of violence included many white collar Palestinians
of the sort who, in a setded social system, usually tend to be bul-
warks of law and order. For example, one college-educated young
bank accountant declared that if he were head of the government:
T would march on Palestine and do not care whether I will be
the loser or the victor.” (251) A 34-year-old college-educated his-
tory teacher said that if he headed the government: “I would fight
Israel and would subjugate die Jews as Nebuchadnezzar and
Scneclinrib did in the past and I tell you the day shall come when
this shall take place.” (146) Other questions further revealed,
among Palestinians, the most intense bitterness against the British
and tlie most frequent endorsement of violence.

The pressure generated by these intense Palestinians forced the
go\ ernment to grant diem increased political participation. In 1954
two opposition parties received recognition, though they “repre-
sented not real political groupings, but the private instruments of
individual politicians,” and the Communist-led National Front
(o -ju >ha olAVatanitjya) emerged openly. 81 Joining with crypto-
ommunist groups and National Socialists, they organized urban

( 314 ) The Arab Worlds

election riots in the course of which American and British govern- -
ment buildings were fired and sacked. Although the government
retained power by rigging the election, the explosions of popular
sentiment evoked by the episode undermined its authority. 32 The
relatively free elections of October 1956 reflected the government’s
uneasy respect for “public opinion” in action.

Not only internal issues, but the large questions of foreign
policy that agitated Jordan after the merger, came to be decided
by street mobs. The December 1955 riots against Jordans acces-
sion to the Baghdad Pact capped the trend. Communists and refu-
gees joined in organizing demonstrations that used the slogans
of Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs { e.g., describing the Pact as a British-
Zionist plot to sell out Jordan to the Jews) and in the process
nearly produced a coup d'etat. Two governments resigned and only
the intervention of the Arab Legion quieted the disturbances. 33
A major victory of the extremist Palestinians followed soon after,
when the British head of the Legion was unceremoniously booted
out and his place taken by a young Palestinian officer with marked
Egyptian sympathies. Subsequently King Husayn, making decisive
use of the loyalty and troops of the Beduin chieftains, has handed
the pro-Soviet, pro-Cairo extremists a sharp defeat. But the balance
is precarious and the drama is far from completed. Excursions,
alarms, reversals lie ahead.

For, here as elsewhere in the Middle East, popular discontent
and growing anti-Westernism have nourished the Communist move-
ment. The Jordan Communist Party has continuously gained ad-
herents and fellow-travelers. The government’s policy of treating
liberals as harshly as Communists has encouraged cooperation be-
tween the two groups. Led by the settled Palestinians, not merely
the embittered refugees in the camps, the intelligentsia provide
leadership and core membership. These cadres, particularly large
in the old strongholds of Palestinian Communism (Jerusalem, Beth-
lehem and Nablus), quickly established themselves among pro-
fessional men in Jordan. “Teachers, physicians, and lawyers were
approached and cells established in the upper forms of secondary
schools, and these became the backbone of the party.” 34 Most o
them were nonrefugees and fairly well-off financially— e.g.,, they
never figured on the relief rolls of UNRWA. 35

So much for the impact of the Palestinians upon the political
scene in Jordan. How did the highly visible changes centered in
‘Amman enter into the lives of Jordanians of different type and

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 315 )

sfition? To deal with this question, respondents were sorted ac-
cording to the four principal locales of Jordanian life: desert, wl-
hce town, city. The four groups were constituted as follows: 26
desert Beduin, 12 village Farmers, 55 town Enterprisers 29 city
Elite.* These groups differed consistently on the four indices of
the basic typology— urbanization, literacy, media participation, em-
pathy-wliich together represent the degree of modernity in a
person's style of life.

The desert Beduin were, of course, a group lacking all the
attributes of modernity (aside from one literate). The village
Farmers, with little or no education, were smallholders working
their own parcels of land. (It is noteworthy that this small group,
With only 12 members, positioned itself consistently between Beduin
and Enterprisers on all tests of modernization.) The town Enter-
prisers are middle-class business people, almost half with high
school education. The Elite includes the college-educated upper-
middle and upper classes.

Between these four groups there are strikingly large and regu-
lar differences of attitude and outlook. We shall deal with these by
way of their communication behavior. The next sections of this
chapter take each group in turn. Here we present some comparative
data to clarify the scope of differences between them. As the Beduin
arc illiterate and the Elite are college-educated, naturally there is
a huge difference between their levels of information about the
world. The other two groups position themselves with remarkable
consistency between these extremes. When asked to identify the
Secretary-General of the United Nations, for example, no Beduin
-but all Elite except one-could name Trygve Lie. The propor-
tions responding correctly were: 0 Beduin, 17 % Farmers, 73% Enter-
prisers, 97% Ehte. Such differences reflect their interest in, and
access to, news of the larger world. When asked to tell the inter-
viewer the last news item they had heard-a question we have
found illuminating in previous chapters— their responses distributed
as shown in Table 3. Family and local news, which preempts the
a ention of most Beduin, drops sharply among rurals and falls off
to msigruficance among Enterprisers and Elite. Conversely, inter-
national news non-existent among Beduin, composes nine out of
ems recalled by the Elite. Interest in news is related, we have

of these four groups throughout this chapter is based
rt Communication and Public Opinion in Jordan"

uucussion or
f* 19 ? BASR report
J. M. Styccs.

(316)

The Arab Worlds

Table 3 — Recall

of News Items

Beduin

Formers

Enterprisers

Elite

Family or local News 68%

20%

2%

0%

National News

16

25

22

9

International News 0

50

70

91

Other

16

5

6

0

Total

100

100

100

100

seen, to the s

ivailability of media. How people

get their news con-

ditions what

news they get. Respondents learned the news items

they had recalled through the channels shown

in Table 4.

Table 4 — Sources of Recalled News

Beduin

Farmers 1

Enterprisers

Elite

Word of Mouth

100%

50%

26%

15%

Radio

0

42

49

36

Newspaper

0

8

25

49

Total

100

100

100

100

These figures illustrate the historic shift from oral to media
networks. Word-of-mouth is the exclusive channel of Beduin news,
which consists mainly of family or local items. Use of the media
increases directly as one climbs the social scale, and with the
range of news interest expands. The newspaper shows a steady
increase in use, while radio shows a characteristic decline (relative
to newspapers) among the Elite-reflecting the preference fre-
quently found among educated people for acquiring intelligence
through the eye rather than the ear. These differences in source
of recalled items were confirmed as general differences in media
exposure by responses to this set of questions: “Do you listen to
the radio? Read the newspaper? Attend the cinema? Do you know
which foreign stations can be heard in Jordan? Do you hear for-
eign broadcasts?”

Table 5 — Exposure to Media

Beduin

Farmers

Enterprisers

Elite

Listen to Radio

0

58%

80%

97%

Read Newspaper

0

25

63

93

Attend Cinema

0

25

58

83

Know of Broadcasts by
Britain

0

42

69

97

America

0

25

27

62

Russia

0

17

22

59

Hear Foreign Broadcasts

0

28

57

72

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 317 )

Awareness and exposure to the media increased consistently with
rising rank in the social structure. The top position of BBC among
international broadcasters was once again confirmed by these
data. Noteworthy are: (1) the general awareness of BBC among
the Elite; (2) the extraordinarily high proportions of Elite and
Enterprisers who claim actually to listen; and (3) the relatively
small differences in awareness, among all classes, of American and
Russian broadcasts. (This last point suggests the equal-indiffcrence
to the bipolar centers which, though shocking to many Westerners,
is a major component of political attitudes among the growing
corps of newly-participant Arabs.)

What do the different groups like to hear on radio?

Table 6 — Favorite Radio Programs

1 #tfu/n

former!

tnltrprhtn

tint

N«w>

0

71%

90%

64%

Koran

0

71

14

4

Arabic music

0

57

57

42

W«s1«rn music

0

0

14

6B

News and music are popular with all three groups. Fewer of the
Elite, who prefer newspapers, favor news broadcasts. Western
music is heard, where at all, almost uniquely by the Elite. While
71% of Fanners prefer the Koran, this item is insignificant among
Enterprisers and Elite. The differences summarized in the pre-
ceding tables express in statistical frequencies the bare bones of
profound contrasts in lifestyles. These group contrasts are the
meat of the story. We begin with the Beduin.

2. The Constrictive World of the Beduin

As Jordan is the most impoverished land in the Fertile Crescent,
so tlie Beduin are its most depressed element. The trend of re-
cent decades lias worsened the nomadic way of fife in Jordan. 30
Tlie British extended the area of settlement and the fellahin’s land
was protected from Beduin herds. Newer trade and communica-
tions undermined tlie market for animal products, basis of the
nomadic economy. Increasing control by tlie central government
all but eliminated the raiding that had provided tlie tribes with
excitement, pride and sustenance.

( 318 ) The Arab Worlds

The continuous deterioration of Beduin society forced many
into agriculture or into semi-nomadism, based on goat and sheep-
raising in limited districts rather than camel-breeding over large
areas. The true Beduin— camel-raisers belonging to one of the noble
tribes— numbered only 40,000 in the 1940’s compared to 120,000
semi-nomads (out of a total population of 340,000). As few inter-
views were made in the southern and eastern desert areas, most
of the Beduin sample are semi-nomadic. But they differ enough
from villagers and townfolk to be called Beduin— since the sample
ranges from a nomad woman, attached to a wandering tribe which
subsists only on camel products, to a dweller in a permanent camp
near a village “so he is supposed to know more and therefore he
wears trousers under his garments.” (194)

The condition of the Beduin eh'cited the pity of more than one
interviewer. Their poverty was softened only by their unquestion-
ing acceptance of it. Beduin responses revealed a fatalistic resigna-
tion to their lot: “I am satisfied with what God gives me, and that
is enough.” (917) “I am living thanks to God, and everything I
want is here so I am happy.” (188) Also characteristic of die
Beduin was the total unawareness of the world outside their im-
mediate environment. Geographic isolation, poverty, illiteracy have
circumscribed interest in affairs beyond "our tents and our camels ’
and excluded them from the network of modem communication.
The media have wanton ways, however, and intrude where they
have not been invited. Even among the Beduin, as will appear,
they have insinuated some of that restlessness which augurs change
on the social horizon. But meanwhile, the dominant tonality of
Beduin life still resounds, in the interviews, through classic themes.

The Tribal Focus: The mark of the Beduin is his complete
absorption into tribal life. The tribe and its parts— sub-tribe, sec-
tion, family— are the primary objects of personal loyalty. Tribal
affiliation is the source of safety and, conversely, expulsion from the
tribe for some grievous offense is the gravest sentence. Law and
morality are also defined in tribal terms, for only a rare central
government could effectively mete out social sanctions among the
nomads. Personal allegiance to any larger social unit has been his-
torically an expedient mode of material gain for the tribe. Beduin
shaylchs were adept at playing off one ruler against another. But
within the tribe, the shaykh was in principle only the first among

Jordan: One State tcith Tico Peoples ( 319 )

peers. This has stimulated the theory of "Beduin democracy"
though "fraternal anarchism” may more accurately describe their
attitude toward public authority. Tin’s feeling shows in their
responses:

Wc Beduins don't have prime ministers and we don’t like them.
{Why?] We arc free and have no ruler but God. (197)

Nobody is head here and we don’t want prime ministers. (Why?)
We are all brothers and have no need for foreign heads. (151)

Attachment to the tribe is evident in the consistent Beduin re-
fusal to imagine living in a different land. Imagination was con-
stricted by primary identification not with place— for the Beduin
lacks the peasant’s devotion to his particular piece of land— but with
tribe. Said one: "I will never leave this country because I will not
think of becoming a foreigner to my tribe and their camp.” (151)
And the interviewer pointed out:

Bcduins believe that having to travel far from one’s country and
relatives and friends is a curse that descends from the forefathers to the
child.

The conditions under which travel becomes plausible for Beduin
is movement of the intact tribe en masse to another grazing area—
a far cry from personal mobility:

I will go to any land where there is enough food for our tribe and
the cattle provided they accept all of us. [Which country would you
think of?) I don’t care.

Disdain for Civilization: "Beduin” is a word of contempt among
educated Arabs. But the Beduin regard themselves as the elite of
the human race and commonly refer to themselves as "thorough-
breds ” Camel and sword are the marks of valor and virility ; the
aristocrat is by definition a fighter. The corollary is Beduin disdain
for tire "civilized” world, which connotes soft living and feminin-
ity. 37 Attitudes toward the mass media are intertwined with these
feelings, for the media, are symbols of the city:

Wc Beduin don’t need the cinema. . . . Those who go are not real
men. They are useless and have lost all value of morals. (120)

Movies spoil men. . . . Those who go get a very bad character and

( 320 ) The Arab Worlds

are no more men. But if you don't go you are a man in all senses of the
word. (087)

By God our hair tents to us are better than a kingly castle. What '
care we for your movies? (1 60)

Those who go [to the cinema] are town people and all of them
are bad. (194)

The Beduin, with a diffuse but sure sense of his own lifestyle,
associates literacy and the participant society. Reading connotes
politics and the evils of urban government:

Those who read are politicians and trouble seekers. If you don’t read
you are far away from trouble and the government. (150)

We don’t have prime ministers and nobody rules us like these girlish
city folk. We rule ourselves. . . . The effendis who read are all hypo-
crites. They all want to be politicians. We want to live peacefully and
away from politics. (90)

City people in ‘Amman are liars and cheats. (79)

Ignorance of the Modern World: Aversion to the modem world
is paralleled by a large ignorance regarding it. “ God knows” was
a frequent response to questions about the West, Russia, and the
mass media. After his interview, one middle-aged Beduin com-
plained: "All the questions were bad. [Why?] Because I couldnt
answer them. You should have asked me about hyenas and I will
tell you.” (186) Another said: "I can tell you about camels and
the wild beasts of the wilderness, but your interview was uninter-
esting and talking about strange things.” (188)

Many Beduin became irritated by the interview because their
specialized knowledge of desert and camel lore (there are about
600 words in the Beduin lexicon for the beast), and their fantastic
memory for genealogies and tribal exploits, remained untapped.
Instead, only their ignorance ( appalling to the city-bred Jordanians
who interviewed them ) was revealed. Of 26 Beduin, 15 had never
heard of the United States, and the others had only the most
innocent notions:

The U.S.? What is it? Where is it? (186)

Where is their country exactly, and do they live like us or like
‘Amman? (079)

The U.S. is a land, always dark and cold and behind the sea. It is
full of beasts. (183)

The U.S. is a very far and cold country and they sleep all winter
and have lots of ice. How many days walking distance is it from
here? (150)

Jordan: One Slate unlit Two Peoples ( 321 )

Concerning Russia there was almost equal ignorance: 12 had
never heard of it, and the others were vague. The one literate
Beduin, a desert patrol guard, told the interviewer that he had
been instructed by his superior to hate all Russians and to jail
anyone who praised them, but he had no idea why. A few did not
like Russia because it had a different religion— Communism.

Knowledge of mass media was restricted: nine had never heard
of movies, three of radio, and three of newspapers:

A radio? What is this thing you arc asking me about? Is it an
important place or man? {1 51)

Radio? Walnhce! [My God!] I have never heard such things before.
How do you know about all these things. ... 1 am listening to riddles
from your mouth. (188)

[Do you know what a movie is?] No by the Great God, what is
that. . . . [Respondent showed great amazement and listened attentively
while I explained shortly what a movie is.] (100)

Ignorance of the outside world is socially acceptable in the
Beduin community. A man is not expected to have opinions on
large matters which, according to his neighbors, do not concern
him. To mind one’s own business is estimable and the Beduin con-
tents himself with a narrow range of opinion and experience.

[Are there any sort of news that you don’t care to hear about at
all?] Yes. We don’t like to hear about war in far away countries. When
Bedtiins start a fight among themselves, they never bother other people
about it. So why should we bother about what other countries have to
go through whether in war or peace? (160)

I am interested in news about my household and my camel because
these are my life and my link with this world. I don’t care for anything
else because wlmt is outside my concern I am not supposed to care
for. (1 18)

All I need to know is here in this tribe and that is enough. . . . My
business is only what happens in the tribe. Do you expect me to worry
my head over what is going on outside our camp? We have enough news
and activity here and wc don’t like to mingle it with the outside. (079)

At the most, external "news” concerns what happens in other
Beduin camps. Beyond the Beduin world Res the obscure domain
of irrelevance and iniquity. A person too curious about this do-
main would be suspected of unBeduin activities.

The Oral Network: Constricted range is shown in Beduin re-
call of die last piece of news they received. The concrete local
event predominates in all cases, viz:

( 322 ) The Arab Worlds

My neighbor slaughtered his wife. ... I felt she deserved it because
she was scandalizing him by looking at other men, and sometimes smil-
ing at them. (184)

Others mentioned camels not producing milk, relatives getting
married, locusts ravaging the pastures. For such news, traditionally
the staple of oral systems, relatives and friends continue to be
the only satisfactory purveyors of information: “From my friends,
my brother and my cousin I get to know everything in my tribe
from A to Z.” (001)

For outside news, the Beduin also depends mainly on known
persons who can be “faced and placed,” such as tribesmen return-
ing from trips with gossip. The media reach him only through
the “two-step flow”— occasional visitors, such as travellers and
merchants, serving as oral relays of information that originated
in the media. 38 One shepherd, relatively more settled than the true
nomads, gets his news with some regularity “from friends or rela-
tives who take frequent visits to ‘Amman, perhaps once a month.
They are usually merchants from the nearby village or on a passing
drive.” ( 155 ) A Beduin woman gets her news rather more sporadi-
cally: “From people like yourself. We see someone with a paper
in his hand. We ask him to tell us what is going on in the world
and they do.” (160)

News is usually exchanged for tribal hospitality. Travelers are
welcomed to the tent of the shaykh— social center of the encamp-
ment. While the shaykh “pounds coffee” the vistor brings tales
of the outer world. Here Beduin form their images of the outside
— e.g., one who “learned” that England is cold and poor from a
passing Amman merchant. (087) But even such contact is rare:

You must be a missionary because nobody talks to us except an old
English woman who tells me of a shepherd boy long ago called David
and how he became a king because he believed in Jesus.

Another source of ideas about the world is the oral literature.
As medieval troubadors carried information around a largely illit-
erate world, so itinerant poets and storytellers are news-bringers
at the Beduin campfire. Their subjects are war, camels, horses,
and women, in that order of importance. Beduin, whose love for
language and passion for heroic legend enliven their otherwise
barren culture, prefer current events cast in this traditional mold. 89
One Beduin woman derived her opinions of British policy in

Jordan; One State with Two Peoples ( 323 )

Jordan and her choice of country for emigration wholly from such
sources;

Our men say that our land loves the English people. In weddings
and evenings of joy, most of our men sing for the victory of the Eng-
lish —

(Where would you like to live if for some reason you had to move
from Jordan?] By God I don't know. The Arabs say nl-Yemcn is a good
place. They think it is the rich and fertile country. Old poetry says
that al-Ycmen is the Garden of Eden where every living thing lives
comfortably and happily. ( 160)

Opinion, as well as information, is locally derived. The shaykh
is considered the authoritative source of correct ideas. Although
the shaykh must respect the views of tribal elders, he occupies the
scat of judgment. He is expected to have opinions, as others are
not, since he is responsible for the tribe’s external relations. It is
his duty to be the repository of correct views, which the rank-and-
file of the tribe may use if they feel the need. Note how these
views converge in one response:

[In your community who is the one whose thoughts arc most highly
respected?] My uncle the Sheikh. He is tall, old and respectable. He
sits on his pillow all day long in his own tent and people of the tribe
come around for advice. (Why is he a leader?] He is the eldest in the
family and the people of the tribe go for the advice of the eldest. [Why?]
Don’t you know the common saying, "who is one day older in age is
one year older in knowledge.” Our respect is according to age, for ex-
perience counts a lot with us.

We like to rest our heads from such responsibilities [as govern-
ment]. Wc eat our daily bread, thank our God and are satisfied and
happy. Our Sheikh alone may worry about that because that is his busi-
ness, (160)

The shaykh and elders "speak for” die tribe. An interviewer
noted that a venerable member of a tribal council was “quite proud
because I chose him, thinking that as lie answers he represents
his tribe.” (090) These elders, who display surprising knowledge
of even their distant desert brethren are regarded as “the true
bearers of desert tradition and history.”'* 0 The respect due them
constrained one interviewer, who was too embarrassed to pose
some of the scheduled questions. He could not ask one elder
‘To whom do you go for advice?” because it would be an affront
to suggest that such a leader should have to go to anyone else for
advice. Another interviewer found it difficult to ask a Beduin

( 324 ) The Arab Worlds

leader what he would like to know about Saudi Arabia, because
“asking this question to a person with the mentality of the re-
spondent and his age and he living next to that country would be
quite insulting.”

Since tribal leaders control the dissemination of news and
views in the Beduin community, their attitudes are important. One
such leader, with pretensions to chieftainship, is described by the
interviewer as follows:

Thirty-three years old, he is of noble descent and is greatly honored
and admired in his tribe. He wears rich, clean clothes and has very
sharp eyes and features with a little beard. He owns many tents and
cattle. He has a shrewd and fearful personality and is very strict and
hard to his servants, yet they like him. (187)

This impressive person turns out to be little different in outlook
from his tribesmen, and distinctive mainly by the resonant con-
fidence with which he articulates traditional convictions. With
regard to communications, he feels that newspapers are “unin-
teresting and unnecessary for life” because “the papers have noth-
ing to offer me . . . our news are in our camp and needn’t be written
in a paper ... I am only interested in news about my people.”
Toward radio his attitude is the same. He would not even like to
listen to one “because it is unimportant in my life.” Where, then,
does he get his news? Not only does he fail to mention sources
outside his own tribe, but he cites intratribal sources stemming only
from his own clan : "I get to know it from my people. From my
brothers and cousins and all the other members of my family.

When asked about his last two pieces of news, the response
illustrated both his parochial range and his high aspirations: “Our
chieftain is dying” and “He wants me to marry his daughter . . .
I don’t like his daughter but she is rich and, therefore, I might
marry her.” Regarding foreign powers, however, he showed two
interesting differences from Beduin of lower status. When asked
what country he would choose if he could not live in Jordan, he
soared beyond the habitual self-constriction of most Beduin: “Amer-
ica. Because they are rich. If I go there I can open a ranch and
keep thousands of sheep and horses and there is lots of fertility
and pasture for them there.” His final comment foreshadows the
Beduin future. He asked the interviewer: “Is this information
going to a school?” The interviewer replied “Yes, why?” The future
chieftain said “I want to send my children to a school.” Sic Transit!

Jordan: One Side with Two Peoples ( 325 )

Refection of the Media: To people who have hardy heard of
the mass media, the notion that these modem contrivances might
be introduced into the tribe is regarded with horror. Such innova-
tions are beyond their understanding and many hastened to disso-
ciate themselves from the diabolical strangeness of radio and
movies:

There must be something bad about this that [allows you to] listen
to voices in the air. ( 186)

Radio? By God if I sec one I will destroy it. This is from the devil.
[What do you miss by not listening?] You are mocking me. Why did
you ask me that? You know I hale a radio and it is evil. (090)

That, the cinema? Oh God forbid! It is the working of the devil. . . .
To go to such things that arc the inspiration of demons are terrible.
Oh no, then one would be tormented by the fire of hell. (021)

Superstition finds "evidence” quickly, since the Traditionalist
logic forbids no post hoc propter hoc. Just as Beduin attribute
rain to their incantations to the Rainmaker, so they connect media
exposure and subsequent evil:

Those who go to the movies beat their wives. The devil gets into
them. I know of one who has gone to the city and then he was seduced
to go to the cinema and when he came back he started being on bad
terms and beating his wife. (150)

Those who listen are full of evil and God's curse comes upon them.
Look at the Palestinians. They listened to the radio and God destroyed
than. We don’t want this trouble here. (090)

Newspapers are rejected, not because they terrify the imagination,
but because they have unpleasant connotations of government
and urbanism, and because they lack utility for the Beduin. For
example:

It writes nothing for us; only for the townspeople . . . papers don’t
write what we want. [What do wc want?] We want Gods mercy and
a good crop this year. (090)

1 will not lose if I don’t read a paper, because papers don’t write
for us. (154)

I can’t rend or write, yet I don’t regret it, because I don’t like to
read papers. They are uninteresting to me. . . . Papers don’t put things
about our life here in the camp. [How do you know that?] The last
time my cousin, who is in the army and knows how to read, read me
one and it had no news about us. . . . Those who read papers do so
because it writes about their affairs and they have to read in order to
know. (001)

( 326 ) The Arab Worlds

Piercing the Isolates Armor: Where are the modernizing ele-
ments within this tradition-bound community? Our theory enjoins
us to seek those who are becoming outwardly-oriented through
exposure to modern media. Do the Beduin youth take the avant-
garde role? Here the lines of demarcation axe not so clear as in
settled communities. Beduin youth are still kept in line by patri-
archal authority:

Cinema is bad and has nothing good to offer to me. [How do you
know that?] That is what my father tells me and I believe him. . . .

I don’t know a radio. But I heard our elder telling us it is an evil device
and dangerous for our character. [What else?] What he says I believe
and I do. (187)

There are some counter-indications. Even among Beduin,
younger people are more prone to resent and resist traditional
values. The ‘young boys” were often described as knowledgeable
about the outside world. They were expected, for example, to
identify overhead planes as British or American. They also showed
more interest in radio and movies. An old Beduin declared: “I
personally will not . . . listen [to the radio] but some of the
young men in the camp would like to listen.” (083)

But innovations do not come easily to the Beduin, even among
the young. A 17-year-old shepherd, chafing at camp life, declared
himself "fairly unhappy . . . because we are not free to do what
we want in this camp. [Like what?] Go to cinemas and listen to
radios.” This lad saw an American movie once and has been rest-
less ever since. He keenly misses the opportunity to watch “good
things” such as "beautiful girls, horses, and very nice fighting
between Indians and white men.” If he had to leave Jordan he
unhesitatingly would choose America “because they have beau-
tiful girls and lovely cars and a thousand and one things. [How
do you know that?] I saw it in the cinema once.” H is question
about the United States is, “Do they still have Red Indians with
feathers growing from their heads?”

Although this boy felt that he was losing nothing by his il-
literacy, and wouldn’t care to learn to read and write, he hoped to
save enough to buy a radio: “Only it has to be very small and
very easy to conceal so that I will not meet the disapproval of my
father.” (001) Another shepherd said: “I like to listen to the radio
but I can’t. [Why?] Because I have no electricity and our elders

Jordan: One Stale with Two Peoples ( 327 )

don’t like the presence of a radio in the camp.” (079) The only
literate Beduin commented:

\Vc don’t listen here because there is no electricity. I think that is
the main cause although some people might tell you the Chief doesn't
allow it. 1 know you could get one. (189)

The main characteristic of the deviant younger men is some
previous exposure to the media and contact with foreigners from
the West. Two shepherd boys illustrate the effects of such con-
tact. One has a cousin who worked for the Americans when
Aramco laid its pipeline from Dhahran to Saida. Assured by his
cousin that the Americans were “good and rich,” the shepherd
admires them and watches for their planes flying overhead. He
regrets that he does not have a chance to listen to the radio, and
blames it on the camp elders. The other shepherd worked in the
British army kitchens during World War II, and still gets news
from merchant relatives who visit ‘Amman. He expressed great
interest in reading the papers (he claims, dubiously, that he can
read), but no newspapers reach his tribe. News to him, unlike
his tribesman, means also national and international news. His con-
tact with the West has pierced the constrictive shell of the tra-
ditional style:

(What do you think you miss by not knowing what the newspapers
have to say?] You lose news about what is going on in the world and in
our country . . . quite important is foreign affairs and what the gov-
ernment is doing. [Why?] Because this although indirectly is responsible
for my life as an individual and a nation. (155)

He also misses radio and believes that people who listen “enjoy
themselves and have a better fun in life.” He has more informa-
tion than others. Not only does he know that the United Nations
meets in America, but he defines it as “an international organiza-
tion that helps to relieve people that are badly in need.” Unlike
most other Beduin, who are happy despite their lot, this shepherd
boy rates himself as “fairly unhappy" (“because I don’t get a good
standard for my life”). Like the Grocer in Balgat, he suffers the
relative deprivation of those learning to aspire for “better tilings”
without the means of getting them. Modernization starts here.

These first stirrings among the young Beduin represent the
motivations which set traditional men into motion and activate the

( 328 ) The Arab Worlds

modernizing sequence. Among the villagers, to whom we now
turn, we see the process actually under way.

3. The Village Farmers

As half the current Jordan population lives off the land, the
rural cultivator is an important type. Unfortunately, the sample
included only 12 farmers. Nearly all of these own their land, and
hence are better off than most; hence, atypically, most of them own
a radio set; the others, who might own a radio, live in non-electrified
villages where battery sets are unavailable. From this small and
unrepresentative group we can make no generalizations about the
farming population of Jordan as a whole. Nonetheless, their re-
sponses do illustrate some aspects of change in rural Jordan.

The world of the farmers is far removed from that of the
Beduin. Better off financially, they have the means and oppor-
tunities to gain wider exposure to tire world. Whereas illiteracy is
the rule among Beduin, four of the 12 Farmers attended high
school. Proximity and trade with larger towns also expose the
Villager more directly to the ways of h is urban compatriots. They
form the reference group by which the Farmer appraises his lot
This may explain, by the mechanism of “relative deprivation,” why
the Farmers are less content than Beduin, who have less in fact.
Whereas most of the Beduin described themselves as “very
happy,” only three of the 12 Farmers did so. This occurred, in
previous case studies, among Transitionals vacillating between tra-
ditional and modem perspectives. No longer isolates, narcotized
by fatalistic passivity, the Farmers are not yet full participants.
Whereas the Beduin, stunned when asked what they would do
as head of the government, responded mainly by silence, the
Farmers divided between passivity and specific responses of this
type:

I would make projects and let the people work. Open roads and
make schools and government buildings. (103)

I will import many tractors and distribute them among the villages
to be used for deep plowing ... I shall send missions to America to
learn the modern ways used in agriculture. (223)

In questions requiring place-transference, rather than role-trans-
ference, the Farmers again divided between constriction and mo-
bility. Whereas hardly any Beduin could imagine living elsewhere

Jordan: One Stale with Two 'Peoples : ( 329 )

than in the Jordan desert, seven Fanners empathized readily:
three chose other Muslim countries, two chose the United States,
and one chose Russia. Even those who would hot move did not
simply react with horror, like the Bcduin, but explained their
views cogently:

The United States is too rich and improved. I will not be able to
catch up with them, being a simple farmer. (86)

I would prefer to stay in my country, because I like to stay where
I was bom. I am not ready to he maltreated or disqualified in other
countries. I can’t bear any insult from any person young or old, other-
wise I will have to make a quarrel. . . . I hear that America is a
beautiful and rich country, nevertheless I don’t risk going there, be-
cause its habits, traditions, way of living and language are all unknown
to me, and I am sure that they are different than ours. (211)

My parents and grandparents are buried in this country so it is
impossible for me to leave it. (223)

The Fanners know more of world affairs than the nomads but
less than the urbanites. Only two could identify the UN Secretary
General, but nine had some idea as to where the UN met, and
all but one gave a roughly satisfactory definition of its purpose.
Their rising level of information reflects their slowly growing pre-
occupation with tlie media. Of the 12 Farmers, only four read a
paper (or have it read to them) and only four go to movies.
The survey deliberately over-sampled radio listeners, but it is in-
teresting that among the eight regular listeners only two read
newspapers and none sees movies. Ordinarily, radio-listeners also
tend to be heavy consumers of other media. To see whether this
deviation reflected only the unavailability of other media, the
Farmers’ responses to questions on interest in the media were re-
viewed. Why radio wins more acceptance is clarified by an edu-
cated well-off landowner:

Papers arc nonsense. They are big lies. ... I gain very much
by not reading them. I will not have a chance to know what lies are
found in the papers. Those who read the paper are government em-
ployees and merchants. Other people use it for wrapping, or they just
look at pictures if there are any. (211)

Several reject newspapers on principle, because print brings them
into unwanted contact with the larger society. Newspapers connote
government, which in turn evokes anxiety about taxes and con-
scription and land records. Jordanians have an aversion to contact

( 330 ) The Arab Worlds

with civil authority, the product of hard experience with unsatis-
factory government.

Cinema is rejected for different reasons. Religious scruples are
involved here by the Islamic injunction against image-making,
which fosters anxiety about deviation from traditional moral stand-
ards:

I only hear of the movies. All those who go there are devils because
it is magic against the laws of religion. (115)

Movies are detrimental and spoiling for the conduct in general of
the people . . . people who don't go are far wiser and better off. They
cling to their old customs and habits. They never have any tendency
to change their present situation. (218)

Older people usually are horrified at the possible effects of movies
upon the young. One rich old Farmer combined this fear with a
frank interest in the forbidden delights for himself:

[Do you remember any film which attracted your attention?] Yes,
that of Hajer Hamdi. She was very enticing and fascinating to such an
extent that I felt very much excited. . . . Films are very detrimental to
young and unmarried people, especially young girls. It is really a shame
for a girl to see such films because she will try to find somebody with
whom she will be able to try the experience. . . . Movies are good for
persons like me. I can spend a very nice time. I feel that I have seen
something about which I can tell my friends. (223)

Such fear of sexual laxity often underlies rejection of the movies.
No traditional Arab could bear to have his honor sullied by a
wayward woman in his family; he would be obliged to take drastic
steps in revenge. The dread of involvement through "plays deal-
ing with love affairs” is expressed thus:

There might be a person who acts as a lover and speaks love words.
So one of the chaps [of the village] will carry these words to one of
his neighboring girls, thus creating trouble and bloodshed. (216)

Radio is less menacing, since it is possible to select broadcasts
in which the modern world does not intrude beyond the tolerance
of the traditional environment. The Farmer is a religious man
(eight of 12 considered religion “very important” and attended
services every week) and religious programs provide the rationale
for the acceptance of radio:

At the beginning I considered the radio to be against our religion
and the devil is in it, but when I heard the Koran on it I changed my
idea and considered it my best friend. I can hear besides the Koran

Jordan: One Stale with Two Peoples ( 331 )

the talks in the Mosques and many religious sayings besides music. (115)

The Sheikh reads the words of God and the prophet in n very
melodious voice for which on hearing I can’t help stopping myself from
submitting all thanks for the Almighty God who has bestowed such
beautiful and effective sayings on us. [Are there any days of the week
that you arc more likely to listen?] Fridays. There is a special prayer
program rcbroadcast from the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, very often
the King prays there. 1 heard his voice asking blessings from God. (216)

Once initial doubts are dispelled, radio becomes a valued friend.
It brings the Koran and sermons, then the beloved Arab songs,
into the home. In gratitude, some farmers endow their sets with
human properties, thus "incorporating” the strange new mechani-
cal device into their familiar world by the traditional empathic
process of anthropomorphism. It is noteworthy that three of the
12 farmers used similar expressions to three different interviewers:

Radio is a very good friend at home who is very loyal and useful.
I consider it my best friend. (115)

It is my best companion. (144)

Radio is the best friend at home. You can order him any time to
stop talking without liim being angry or disappointed. . . . (216)

Further insight on media behavior is gained when listening
Farmers are differentiated according to the size of the arena within
which their news-interest is confined. The interest of some listeners
evaporates at the limits of the local community; with others it ex-
tends to the borders of the nation; still others are interested in
the wider world. When these three types of listeners are classified
respectively as Locals, Nationals, and Cosmopolitans, they show
dusters of common attributes that are congruent with our more
general typology of Traditionals, Transitionals, and Moderns.

Locals: These Farmers, otherwise quite divergent, show no
interest in affairs outside their immediate community:

I am most interested in my own community because such things
are very important. I know what is happening nearby, who was mar-
ked* who has died, how many babies were bom, the market prices
and all such news which have a direct effect on my everyday life. (216)
Listen to news? Never. I am not interested because I don’t want to
buy worry. (86)

This group includes a relatively rich landowner and Mukhtar, de-
scribed by tlie interviewer as follows:

( 332 ) The Arab Worlds

He is the only person who owns a radio and believes that he is
the cleverest in his village. ... He is a little conceited and does not
like to take advice from others. His only reference is the Koran and
religious sayings. ... he is very respectable and religious.

As a youth this landowner attended kuttab , where he learned
laboriously to decipher the Koran, but reading modem newspaper
Arabic is a skill he did not acquire. He neither likes nor under-
stands news of any land: “News are of no interest to me and that
is why I live a peaceful life because we are far from false civiliza-
tion and its troubles.” His disinterest in the outside world is justified
by religious principles. He has excluded the West from his ken
because it is infidel. Thus, he would not dream of going West
because “the women sit with men bareheaded and without sleeves
on their arms and their skirts are very short.” If forced to leave
Jordan, he might migrate to Saudi Arabia, but his questions indi-
cate that even the Land of the Prophet may no longer be holy
enough: “Is it true that they have alcoholic drinks in Jidda? Is it
true that the king allowed foreigners to enter Mecca?” It seems
natural that the media would not appeal to such a man. Yet he
describes the radio as his “best friend,” for the manifest reason
that it supplies him with Koran readings and mosque sermons.
Monopoly radio ownership also bolsters his preeminent position
in the village, as it did for tire Chief of Balgat. It is an augury
of social change when such traditional opinion-leaders sense that,
to maintain their position, they must equip themselves with the
new techniques of opinion-formation. But restricting the new by
partial incorporation also transforms the old. The traditional opin-
ion leader who has “incorporated” radio is a different man than
he was before, and his conversion accelerates changes in the com-
munity for which he speaks.

Nationals: Several farmers who mentioned news among their
favorite programs are early-Transitionals. They prefer national to
local news, but they do not care about foreign news:

[What are you least interested in on the radio?] Foreign news. They
are news of far away events that have no effect on us here. (85)

Foreign news is only for foreigners. They care for their business and
so we care for ours. Why should I worry what happens in Europe or
America? For example, when I Jive here, what can I do if I hear their
news? Nothing, so I will be just losing my time on something use-
less. (216)

I don’t like to hear the foreign news. . . . BBC foreign news are

Jordan: One Slate with Two Peoples ( 333 )

so boring and monotonous that you can’t tolerate hearing it. I simply
close the radio for I don’t want to discharge the batter}' on non-
sense. (218)

The latter, a rich, literate landowner, not only rejects foreign
news, but also dislikes "educational talks and plays . . . You only
hear imaginary things which you can’t get anything out of.” (218)
He discharges his battery only on worthwhile fare-agricultural
programs for practical fanning advice, Koran readings and Arabic
music beamed from Egypt. Though literate, he does not read
newspapers and regards movies as "superfluous and unnecessary.”
Even his concern with national news is related to personal interest:
"Because I am a landowner and I like to be always aware of taxes
imposed and levied on properties.” (218) Another literate land-
owner elaborates this view:

I am most interested in what the government is doing. This con-
cerns me most. I shall be able to estimate my net proceeds, when I
know how much I have to pay rent for the land, how much for the
government. I shall be conversant with the prices of the market as
compared to that of the government. This will help me not to be
cheated. (223)

Their interest broadens beyond the national arena only on
major events concerning Pan-Arabism. Several National listeners
mentioned French activity in North Africa with intense feeling
because it touched the Arab-Muslim components of the extended self.
Foreign news, not involving these symbols of identification, usually
is dismissed. For example, one Fanner, keenly interested in Morocco,
was unconcerned by news of the Korean War: “I only listen and
fed nothing spedal about it They are fighting; let them do so until
they get tired. Who cares?” (144)

Cosmopolitans: Among the Farmers only two, both Palestinians,
exhibited a range of news interests that encompassed the foreign
world. As an important graft on Jordanian growth, bearing seeds
of tlie future, their views merit examination. One of these, working
a farm with his parents and sisters in a village near Irbid is de-
scribed by the interviewer as “the type of scientific fanner not
plentiful in the country and bound to be a leading person in that
fidd. He goes to the movies only infrequently, but reads a news-
paper every day:

Newspapers are very effective on the mentality of the public. They
tell them about politics and what the government is doing. ... I

( 334 ) The Arab Worlds

would like to have a newspaper that helps the farmers and the peasants
in improving their living conditions. [Why?] Because our country is
agricultural in the first place. (145)

His media preferences show a Transitional configuration. The
parts of the newspaper which interest him most are “proverbs,
translations and local news”; also his two favorite radio programs
are news from Jerusalem and local news. While he regards radio
as a medium for education, he dislikes listening to “silly talk and
long, repeating speeches.” Although aware that Britain, America,
Russia, Turkey and France broadcast in Arabic, he listens to them
“rarely” because;

They only put propaganda in Arabic. I care to put on Arabic pro-
grams so that my people at home can share with me in having enter-
tainment.

But the last two pieces of news he recalled were about the Chinese
intervention in Korea and the “disgusting” actions of the French
in Morocco. His reaction to the former was only casual because
“we have no interest in the Far East.” Though aware of the world,
his interest does not really go beyond an interest in agricultural
information.

A somewhat deeper involvement with the world at large is
exhibited by the other Palestinian (239), who comes from an
authentic cosmopolitan background. Aon educated Orthodox Chris-
tian, who speaks English and French very well, he was bom and
raised in Cairo. “His social role,” comments the interviewer, is
limited to that of a gentleman fanner who tries to teach the
peasant around him a few things.” His personal style is illustrated
by his vigorous hatred for Britain, by his confidence in his own
judgments of public issues, and by his readiness to assume re-
sponsibility;

[As head of government] I’ll never allow a Britisher to interfere. I
will be a second Atatiirk, deal with people in a severe way, but it will
get you somewhere. Teach people to be independent.

[As editor of a newspaper] I would run a commentator paper, on
all that the government (damn them) does.

He reads the paper every day, and formerly was a faithful radio
listener. Asked under what conditions he would resume listening,
he replied:

I would have to persuade the municipality of Bethlehem to spread

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 335 )

an electric cable to my farm, and then I would have to buy a radio to
replace the battery set 1 sold.

As a Palestinian he does not identify with Jordan as yet Asked
to describe Jordanians, he instead talks of Palestinians and calls
them “courageous and misled” Although he calls Americans
“crooks and liars” for their Palestine policy, he would love to live
in the United States: “It suits my farming work and a large,
spacious country that gives die chance to carry on any agricultural
scheme ” Newspapers are good in his eyes:

They enlighten to new phases in life. . . . They write about recent
discoveries and lectures by important people. They use small maps and
war news, the latest being Korea, to illustrate the attacks and retreats
of a war.

Broad interests and empathic capacity are occasionally circum-
scribed, however, by traces of the parochial outlook. Often, he
relates international news to his immediate local interests in order
to justify his sense of their importance:

1 like it [foreign news] because it shows me where I stand in the
world. From it I will know what is happening. . . . [For example] the
division of Syria and Lebanon. That affected our farm a bit because
the price of our vegetables went up. The newspaper wrote about it,
and 1 knew what was going to happen.

But there is a definite strain of disinterested “cosmopolitanism,”
of interest in events “on their own terms.” He reads five foreign
publications (English, French and American) which are quite
varied: Better Homes and Gardens , Dairy Farming, Home Notes,
Woman and Home, and UYllustration.

4. The Town Enterprisers

The shopkeepers and government clerks who compose this
group represent the growing class of newly articulate people in
Jordan. They have left traditionalism far behind and are now
situated just above or below the fine line of Modernity. Most
have had elementary or high school education; their opinions
indicate a good, though unsophisticated, knowledge of world
affairs; they are well acquainted with press, film and radio. Almost
half are Palestinians in moderate circumstances, with good educa-
tion, and daim to speak some English. To compare those living In

( 336 ) The Arab Worlds

larger towns with those in more rural settings, the 55 Enterprisers
were divided into two groups. Table 7 compares the rural and
urban Enterprisers.

Table 7 — Rural and

Urban Enterprisers Compared

Education

Rural

Urban

Almost none

28%

19%

Elementary

28

35

High School

44

46

College

-

-

Total

100%

100%

Socioeconomic Status

Destitute

5%

5%

Poor

34

19

Modest

56

54

Well Off

5

22

Rich

—

-

Total

100%

100%

Communication Habits

Listen to Radio

84%

79%

Read Newspapers

55

67

Attend Motion Pictures

50

62

Number of Respondents

(18}

(37}

The relatively small differences indicate that occupational
mobility is the key attribute— an individual tends to modernize
if he makes his living in a typically urban occupation, even though
he actually resides in the countryside. The urban Enterpriser is
somewhat more educated and media-participant than his rural
counterpart— but this may reflect only greater availability of papers
and movies. Before turning to tire modal profile of the Enterpriser,
we glance at the deviant case of an illiterate tinker (80). A man
who looks backward , remaining close to the Beduin or Fanner
mentality, the Tinker shows the large gap that must be crossed
to reach the typical Enterpriser’s level of modernity.

The Tinker exhibits strong proprietary feeling toward local
news. His occupation requires passing contacts with a great number
and variety of people in the urban manner. His handling of in-
formation so acquired qualifies him as an informal “opinion leader
in his community. The interviewer noted:

Although a tinker he looks more like a boss in his neighborhood
and practices lots of authority ... he had an air of confidence and a

Jordon : One State with Two Peoples ( 337 )

superior self complex He could worthily be claimed a dictator in

his kingdom.

The Tinker operates as a highly traditional “relay” in an oral
ndwork. Both his inputs of information and his outputs of opinion
ore strictly parochial. In explaining how he gets his news, the
Tinkers extreme localism leads him to regard persons outside his
village as foreigners:

Usually our imam carries most of the news to me. [What does he
(ell you?)' Oh different things like the other day he told me that my
uncle married his only daughter to a foreigner from the other village.
. . . I felt disappointed because ... he must have kept her for his
family and village men.

His attitudes toward news are those of traditional man:

This (local news] is my only interest. I get to know what is hap-
pening in my village— who is marrying who and who has died. [I am
least interested in] foreign news. Because it is not my country so why
must I know about its news? I really don’t care what happens to them.
Let the foreigners kill each other. Why must I worry?

He is exposed to none of the mass media and considers that he
loses little by this, since movies and newspapers are for the rich.
Toward the radio, he is somewhat more favorable:

I would like to have one because I like to listen to some programs.
. . . Oh, like the Koran and music. . . . Give me a radio and the cost
for running it and I will listen to anything you want.

Ilis conceptions of the outside world represent the extreme limit
of ignorance in the entrepreneurial group. On Russia, for example,

I don’t know much about this country. It is mysterious to me because
no one hears nothing about it. . . . Russia is very backward and it is
all cold jungles where beasts and very bad war-like tribes kill each
other. They tell me that it is 150 degrees below zero there.

The Tinker has hardly more information than his Traditional
compatriots, but he has many more opinions. It is his readiness
to express views on a variety of issues that puts him over the
lower limit of Transitionalism.

The modal profile of the Enterprisers exhibits a much more
modem array of attitudes than the Tinker’s, particularly with
respect to news, views, and the media. As compared with Farmers,
who regard radio as a living thing. Enterprisers hardly ever refer

( 338 ) The Arab Worlds

to radio in animistic terms. They view it instrumentally, in the
modern manner, as a channel which supplies entertainment and
education. When asked, “What do you think of the radio?” Enter-
prisers responded in these terms and with no references to radio
as a source of religious edification. Radio is good merely because
it is interesting; it requires no rationale in terms of higher morality
as among the Farmers. Even the newspaper is seen in this light
A print-seller, living in an area without newspapers, bemoaned
the entertainment he missed and looked to radio with a kind of
desperation:

The radio is the only entertainment left for me, because I miss the
newspapers. So to keep interested in what is going on I must have the
radio or else I will break down and die. (55)

Circumstances oblige several Enterprisers, living in areas isolated
from the principal towns where newspaper delivery is non-existent
or erratic, to rely heavily upon radio for their news. Said one:

I do not get newspapers here and people hardly leave the village,
the roads are no good and we are out from the rest of the kingdom: so
you can see why we do not read papers here. ... I miss a lot hut
it is not my fault. We are living like animals. There is nothing hut
work, food and sleep. (215)

Illiteracy among the entrepreneurial group also contributes
to the popularity of radio news: “Here is my newspaper [pointing
to his radio], I can’t read but I can hear so I don’t miss a single
bulletin.” (055) This is an important characteristic of the Enter-
prisers. Illiterates in more traditional groups tend to deprecate
the radio. Beduin, and even radio-listening Farmers, rate word
of mouth” as their most important source of news. Enterprisers
rely mainly upon the media for their information, as in Table 8,
but with interesting differences between rural and urban persons.

Table 8 — Principal Sources of News

Rural

Urban

Radio

72%

65 %

Newspaper

39

54

Word of Moufh

34

19

The rurals rely upon word of mouth more than the urbans; but
they rely much more heavily upon radio— somewhat more, indeed,
than do the urbans.

Jordan: One Stale with Two Peoples ( 339 )

Some literate Enterprisers also prefer radio, condemning news-
papers as agencies used to dupe the masses:

1 don't think I lose anything by not reading the papers because I
don’t find much interest in them. The papers are full of untruthful news
in order to betray many of die simple people like me. ... I like very
much to hear the radio. (225)

Two other literates echoed this view with added arguments— that
newspapers only copy and distort news that is heard sooner and
cheaper on the radio. Both trust radio, but maintain that news-
papers rework radio news to their own designs:

All our papers are censored and do not write things correct They
get roost of their news from the radio. Why should I poison my mind
by reading such false news? . . . Why should I pay money to read
news when I could get them from the radio? (214)

One of my friends who works at al-Urduh newspapers told me that
they take domestic news from the coffee houses, official communiques
from the radio and all the rest from their own fabrications. (219)

The Enterprisers are clearly “news conscious.” When asked
to name their favorite radio program, 90% gave top priority to
news (as compared with 14% for Koran readings). What kind of
news are they interested in and why? When asked to tell the last
news items they had received, the Beduin exclusively and the
Fanners mainly recalled family and Jocal news. By contrast, over
half the items recalled by Enterprisers were international, and
an additional 15% of items concerned Jordan-Israel relations. On
this point, in Table 9, there were interesting differences between
the rural and urban subgroups. Rural interest in family and

Table 9— Last Item of News

durol

Fomily or local newj

23%

Nationol

20

Inlernollonol

50

Olher ,

7

Tolal

100%

Urban

2 %

22

70

6

100 %

the uxbans, who put the

»v they listen* lo°” “ lem ? Ho ” al urban responden

- > n to international news just “to be well inform e<

( 340 ) The Arab Worlds

or because it “is good to listen to die news” Such attitudes
toward “the news” and toward the desirability of being “well-
informed” become manifest, in the Middle East, among the
Transitionals. Often this occurs only because the individual’s oc-
cupation encourages it. In such cases, interest in foreign news
is related to immediate economic utility— the perspective of the
petit bourgeois, whose main concern in life is his shop. Anything
which impinges upon it will attract his interest; anything else
tends to be irrelevant. Several small Enterprisers reveal this per-
spective. A goldsmith is concerned with gold:

I like to hear foreign news, because to a certain extent these news
have a relation to my work. The price of gold is higher than it was
before the war in Korea. ... I eare for news about wars or any other
changes in the international affairs because such news have a direct
connection with my work. If I don’t follow the news daily I can’t work;

I will be losing a lot in difference of price only. (1 99)

Similarly, a grocer says “the war in Korea affects the market in
the village.” A cereal agent explains:

I care for the foreign news so that if a war is going to happen I shall
have to guard against it by taking care of my expenses and all other
matters which will be regarded as extravagant. (153)

A tailor is concerned with government economic policies:

It has direct effect on me. Anything that the government does,
whether in putting more taxes or giving licenses to import goods and
all other things, will cast a beam of light as to whether I shall charge
people or not. (104)

A driver is interested in the potential advantages of war for himself:

I am most interested in foreign news because I am very anxious
to get a war. Because then I can work for more pay. The British army
will come . . . they will employ me for more pay and that is good. (91/

A barber is concerned with the increasing prices of imports:

I like to hear the foreign news. Of course nowadays the most im-
portant news are about the Korean war. All the markets of the world
are affected. All prices went higher since the Korean war. All the articles
which were imported from the various countries have stopped now.
( 200 )

As one goes down this roster, it seems increasingly likely that

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 341 )

these respondents arc playing the thoroughly modem game of
finding "practical” reasons to “rationalize” their preferences. That
international prices should concern a goldsmith seems plausible;
wth a barber rather less so. But the “reality” of these views is
less relevant than that the Enterprisers have begun to perceive
connections between their personal concerns and the larger uni-
veme of events. This is not cosmopolitanism, but an intermediate
step from localism to a wider arena. That this step occurs in the
Cold War epoch tends to linlc it with the political issues which
nowadays dominate the wider arena.

Enteiprisers who listened to international radio tended to
divide, on the question of preferences, into two groups: those
favoring Arabic broadcasts from Cairo as against British broad-
casts from London. These groups differed in more than a simple
matter of taste. A striking difference was the greater interest in
and knowledge of international affairs possessed by BBC listeners.
For example, all but one BBC listener correctly identified Trygve
Lie, whereas less than half of the others could do so. In recalling
news items, twice as many BBC listeners referred to international
events. Among BBC listeners the distinctly modem type of news
interest becomes quite manifest— the interest in news for its own
sake. Such persons sometimes identify more intensely with the
world than with their country. Thus a wholesale grocer:

What happens in our country is insignificant as compared to the
foreign world. What does it affect the world if we had not rain this
Winter? But it affects them if Russia has overwhelmed Korea and
occupied it. (172)

This attitude begins to appear among respondents who heard
BBC at all in the past month; it is highly developed among those
listeners who heard BBC most often in the past month (and hence
may be considered BBC veterans). Three such “veterans” rank at
the top of the media-consumption scale. All three have a good
knowledge of English, two speak French, and two read such
iorejgn publications as Life, The Spectator, Picture Post and
coders Digest. Their psychic posture is illustrated by their de-
tached analytic comments on these magazines. One such, com-
Ufc A and Spectator, finds that the latter's “arguments are
r sound and reasonable. It is more scientific and original.” (169)

( 342 ) The Arab Worlds

The owner of a stone quarry, asked to compare Picture Post and
Readers Digest with newspapers published in Jordan says:

The difference is almost equal to the distance between Mercury and
the earth. Foreign writers are specialized, better paid; therefore they
can afford to improve their qualifications; thereby they have productive
ability of a much higher standard. (013)

These respondents feel that they “belong” in the larger world as
participants, and consider it important to “know what is going
on.” They articulate modem reasons for their interest in foreign
news. One feels the obligation to know; another stresses the en-
joyment of knowing.

I am following the news of the war in Korea. I don’t know why,
but I find myself interested to follow such news very closely. It doesn’t
affect me directly, but I am indirectly affected, for if they have an effect
on the country’s situation then I will be affected in the same man-
ner. (169)

The world is getting so near together that one enjoys knowing tilings
from here and there. (013)

This is a long step toward the Modem perspective which, in
Jordan, we find mainly among the group we have designated Elite.

5. The Cosmopolitan Elite

As the most self-confident and activist group, the Elite exhibit
the participant style of modem man. Twice as many Elite as
Enterprisers (and three times more than Fanners) declared that
the individual can do something to solve the biggest personal
problems that he faces. But vis-a-vis the West, the Elite are rela-
tively insecure. This shows in their frequent description of Britons
or Americans as cold and snobbish; many of them feel personally
rejected as well as politically dominated. The fear of being mis-
understood by the West runs through some interviews. A young
lawyer, bom in Jaffa and living in ‘Amman, 26 years old and de-
scribed as having an aristocratic bearing,

was very particular in stressing to write full details— word by word—
of what he said. -‘But why?” I asked him. He said, “I like that the
Americans will have a correct idea about the Arabs. Not all the Arabs
are Beduin. There are many who are educated and have valuable
thoughts and ideas.” (222)

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 343 )

Another young refugee in ‘Amman, a rich company executive aged
30, made the following reply when asked what he thought about

the interview:

Americans can tell how far behind them is the rest of the world.
Became they think that they are superior in every field, they look
down on all the other races. (203)

The thread of ambivalence toward the West, so profound among
(lie Egyptian and Syrian elite, also runs through the Jordan re-
sponses. But extreme oscillations between admiration and aversion
occasionally are reduced to equilibrium in a well-ordered per-
sonality. Thus, a college-educated restaurant owner, aged 30, said:

I would like my countrymen to know how to choose the good things
about western civilization for in my opinion this is a very important
stage , , . there is a tendency towards imitating the Westerners in
everything they do. (015)

The most salient Elite characteristic is its Palestinian back-
ground. These respondents were interviewed less than a year
after formal unification of die East and West Banks into one
nation. Psychic displacement was indicated by their responses
to the interviewers request for adjectives to describe “Jordanians.”
Some refused. Some substituted “Arabs” and others “Palestinians.”
Still others, less discreet, applied to Jordanians such adjectives
as “stupid," “rash,” “ignorant,” “lazy,” "in need of medical aid,”
“obedient and simple”— clearly implying that these descriptions
applied not to themselves, but to the backward people in whose
midst they unhappily were settled. This Palestinian influx was
the latest accretion to what was already an “external elite.” Trans-
jordanian officialdom had been “recruited” earlier, under the Brit-
ish mandate, from surrounding areas. A careful observer in the
mtd-1930s concluded that most government officials, teachers and
professionals in the Amirate were imported. The educated Pales-
tinians naturally found Jordan lacking in the civilized amenities
to which they had grown accustomed in Haifa or Jaffa. They re-
sented the lack of freedom in politics and the press. They were
appalled by prevailing standards of literacy and health. And they
were preoccupied with problems external to those of Jordan.

The media judgments of the Elite illustrate their discontent
iracticaHy none of the refugees had anything good to say about
Jordans leading paper, abUrdun , which was cited as least liked,

( 342 ) The Arab Worlds

The owner of a stone quarry, asked to compare Picture Post and
Readers Digest with newspapers published in Jordan says:

The difference is almost equal to the distance between Mercury and
the earth. Foreign writers are specialized, better paid; therefore they
can afford to improve their qualifications; thereby they have productive
ability of a much higher standard. (013)

These respondents feel that they “belong” in the larger world as
participants, and consider it important to “know what is going
on.” They articulate modem reasons for their interest in foreign
news. One feels the obligation to know; another stresses the en-
joyment of knowing.

I am following the news of the war in Korea. I don’t know why,
but I find myself interested to follow such news very closely. It doesn’t
affect me directly, but I am indirectly affected, for if they have an effect
on the country’s situation then I will be affected in the same man-
ner. (169)

The world is getting so near together that one enjoys knowing things
from here and there. (013)

This is a long step toward the Modem perspective which, in
Jordan, we find mainly among the group we have designated Elite.

5. The Cosmopolitan Elite

As the most self-confident and activist group, the Elite exhibit
the participant style of modem man. Twice as many Elite as
Enterprisers (and three times more than Fanners) declared that
the individual can do something to solve the biggest personal
problems that he faces. But vis-a-vis the West, die Elite are rela-
tively insecure. This shows in their frequent description of Britons
or Americans as cold and snobbish; many of them feel personally
rejected as well as politically dominated. The fear of being mis-
understood by the West runs through some interviews. A young
lawyer, bom in Jaffa and living in ‘Amman, 26 years old and de-
scribed as having an aristocratic bearing,

was veiy particular in stressing to write full details— word by word-
of what he said. “But why?” I asked him. He said, “I like that the
Americans will have a correct idea about the Arabs. Not all the Arabs
are Beduin. There are many who are educated and have valuable
thoughts and ideas.” (222)

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 343 )

Another young refugee in 'Amman, a rich company executive aged
30, made the following reply when asked what he thought about
the interview;

Americans can tell how far behind them is the rest of the world.
Because they think that they are superior in every field, they look
down on nil the other races. (203)

The thread of ambivalence toward the West, so profound among
the Egyptian and Syrian elite, also runs through the Jordan re-
sponses. But extreme oscillations between admiration and aversion
occasionally are reduced to equilibrium in a well-ordered per-
sonality. Thus, a college-educated restaurant owner, aged 30, said:

1 wouJd like my countrymen to know how to choose the good things
about western civilisation for m my opinion this is a very important

™4«ng'£ r d“(015) i y ‘ 0War * ™ taHng * he in

tT SaIiCnt E , iitC Characteristi c is its Palestinian back-
ground. These respondents were interviewed less than a year
after fornial unification of the East and UW R,ni, f 7

r^o d M acane„t wasldtJt^ConTe:
lo te Btaronrar, request for adjectives des ^ f

^ Md !*« -m-s-

f “stupid,” "rash,” “ignorant ” “W’ J .? dama ? s such adjectives
“obedient and simnle’-clparlv ■ ^ ° , need med,ca l aid,”

applied not to themselves but to thfbf &ese descriptions
fist they unhappily were settled TB p?* . Pe ° ple * whose
the latest accretion to what was ahead J aIestl 'nian influx was
Jordanian officialdom had been ® f™ 1 eIite ” Tra ™-

wh mandate, from surrounding a ™ a ear ^ e f’ under the Brit-
mid-1930’s concluded that mnef ^ careful observer in the
professionals in th e teachers an!

Jmians naturally found Jordan ^ educat ed Pales-

r? sr-

“ PiMllcd •>)’ Prevail, 'ngbrndardroflih ^ ** press ' They wre

sSK iSS? a ” d ieaIlh - W they

PnJr .r dia i ud grnents of the FjS m h ° $e of J^dan. 7

( 344 ) The Arab Worlds

and often in terms of contempt. Although it provided the only
detailed account of daily government operations in ‘Amman, al-
most all Elite respondents of Palestinian origin read instead al
Difaa or Falastin, published in Jerusalem, which focused on mat-
ters of interest to refugees and reflected more familiar viewpoints.
The rare approval of any Jordan paper by the Elite went to al -
Mithaq, for reasons explained by a refugee lawyer:

I like its dissatisfaction with the prevailing situation in the Arab
countries on the whole, particularly Jordan, and especially the political
aspects of it. [What else?] They also discuss political and social in-
justices in Jordan. (222)

This ‘Amman weekly was the organ of the opposition National
Front, legalized in 1950. Its daily complaints column proved so
popular, however, that it was closed down in March 1951. 41

Elite dissatisfaction with life in Jordan was evident also in
their low opinion of local radio. They turned rather to foreign
broadcasts. Of 15 BBC and VOA listeners among the Elite, only
four approved the local station; the others took a tone of disdain.
Even apart from political issues, the foreign listeners considered its
broadcasts too parochial for their broad interests:

I feel it is limited. Too localized. (175)

It is quite elementary. (203)

I don’t think too highly of them. No variety. ( 105)

This group represented, of course, the peak of Jordanian exposure
to mass media. Of its 29 members, all but one listened to the radio;
all but two read a paper; all but five attended the cinema. All
attended college and practically all lived in the major cities,
‘Amman and Jerusalem. While the group included a poet and a
Member of Parliament, more typical occupations were the pro-
fessions (lawyers, doctors, teachers) and government officials.

As we would expect, despite its anti-Western politics, this was
the most Westernized group in the sample. All but two spoke
English fluently; indeed one woman was so Westernized that she
could read Arabic only with difficulty. Half of the group had
traveled in Europe; 23 of them read such publications as The Neu)
York Times, Time Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Colliers and
Vogue. Striking evidence of modernization was their strong prefer-
ence for Western music, in both the jazz and classical modes. The
M. P. said only: “The music of the local stations is not applicable

Jordan: One State iclth Ttco Peoples ( 345 )

(o the taste of the educated classes.” (012) A high civil servant
explained the cosmopolitan demand for variety more fully:

The musical programs [from Turkey] are varied ever}' night. They
have a different scries with a different tempo. One night they have a
very nice selection of Turkish and Greek tangos. They are really very
pathetic and sensational. Another night they have hot music, jazz and
swing. This is also very enthusiating. On another occasion they have an
excellent series of Spanish guitars. Very often they have classical music
—music of Beethoven and Schubert. (203)

To most of the Elite, the mass media are an indispensable
instrument of modem civilization, serving a deep personal need.
Among these respondents, resistance to the movies on religious
grounds disappeared and their function in modem living was
stressed:

Movies are the best means of showing a nation’s culture and art
through a tangible and visible way. (026)

It can be very good, useful, psychologically and morally. (106)

They arc very- necessary* for life. (050)

A wealthy young architect summed up these views with a tribute
to movies as purveyors of insight, as teachers of the modem style:

Movies arc the best means of communicating a peoples culture and
civilization to the other parts of the world. It is a mirror of a country’s
advance in life. . . . Movies are one of the modem means of enter-
tainment which is quite indispensable as a part of our daily life. I
couldn’t imagine how flat life would be without the movies. It has be-
come very essential that everybody should go to movies and lea m
many tilings about the secrets of life. One usually* pays much money to
learn a new* thing about life. In the movies such a lesson costs very
cheaply. (176)

Newspapers, too, were seen by several Elite respondents as
not merely useful hut essential:

In general they are a necessity in life. Every educated man should
read at least one new'spaper daily*. (146)

Papers are the best means of communication, for conveying a na-
tion s ideas and movements in any part of tire world to another part. (166)

Newspapers are necessary for the community. (050)

Every one of us like and should know* about his neighbors and up
till now the newspaper is the best way that can give us all this. (015)

This feeling for the value of the media reached its peak with
radio. More than any other medium, radio gave this Elite instanta-

(346 )

The Arab Worlds

neous access upon demand to the larger world with which they
identify:

Radio? Wonderful. ... A school in its own. Takes one all round
the world in one sitting. (106)

Radio is very essential. No one can stay without hearing a radio
once or twice a day.

Radio is a necessity in life because during this age of speed one
must know everything as soon as it takes place, otherwise he is out-
dated. (050)

The quality of media interest among the Elite was distinctively
Modern. A majority registered the news-for-its-own-sake attitude,
which, among the Enterprisers, had been exhibited only by the
BBC listeners. Some have learned to handle news at the peak of
modem style, in which world politics is perceived as a game. Thus a
Palestinian pharmacist:

[I listen to the news about Korea] just to know who is winning and
to pass time as if watching a football game. (102)

But this uninhibited modernism of Palestinians reflecting their
own recent liberation was less easy for those who had grown up
in an older traditional environment. Such persons, though they
had learned much that was new, had perhaps not wholly unlearned
the awesome old wisdom which motivated some Transjordanians
to say: “Look at the Palestinians. They listened to the radio and
God destroyed them.” For older persons among the Palestinians,
it was not quite so obvious that God speaks wrathfully through
the radio. But one was beset by doubts and dilemmas. What, after
all, about the movies?

We began this review of the modernizing impact wrought by the
Palestinian influx by sorting respondents according to the four princi-
pal milieux of Jordanian life: desert, village, town, city. Within each
group there are consistencies of similarity; between the groups
there are regularities of difference. Bearing especially on questions
about the mass media, these similarities and differences trace the
course of modernization in Jordan. But as a modem society evolves,
a traditional society passes. What of this story in Jordan? To tell
this story in the same way would require another chapter repeating
the same data in a different setting. This would try, unduly, even
the most patient reader. Perhaps the outlines for such a chapter
can be suggested by a single case.

Jordan: One State with Ttco Peoples { 347 )

The Questioning Qodi, The passing of traditional society in
Jordan is suggested in the responses given by one old Palestinian,
an influential member of the Muslim clergy. Wise and patient,
responsive to the demands made upon him by the world, this
established elder dramatizes the tensions which modernization
engenders in an educated person committed to traditional ways. Tliis
63-vcar-old, white-bearded Qatli (judge), appareled in the flow-
ing robes proper to his profession, occupies a position in Jerusalem
such that "when people address him they take all care to do that
with every respect and they listen carefully when he talks.” (Oil)
A wealthy man, formerly owner of vast orange groves in Palestine,
he studied Islamic law at Istanbul in prc-1914 days. He represents
the top stratum of religious leadership, commanding respect from
all classes, and exempt from the scorn that one young college-
educated refugee had expressed: "You see, most of our sheikhs
and those that pretend to be religious leaders are laymen and they
do not represent the thought of the educated class.” (050) Our
judge falls into a different category. Among his steady stream of
house visitors are not only ordinary folk seeking advice on such
matters as the propriety of taking a second wife, but government
officials and prosperous merchants asking his opinion on problems
of food supply in the event of world war.

In contrast to the secularized leaders who are cut off from
the more religious masses, the Qadi has a ready-made channel of
influence with the population. An important Islamic journal has
complained that religious leaders waste their opportunities to
mold public opinion:

The sermons and speeches that one hears . . . expiate on heresies,
sins, the life after death, its pleasures and torments, corruption and
laxity of sexual morals to the exclusion of all such topics as have a
direct bearing on the social, economic, and political well-being of the
Muslim community. 42

Few religious leaders are equipped to guide Islamic youth over
the spiritual crisis arising from their need to harmonize conflicting
values. The Qadi, however, is cognizant of his role as influential
arbiter between the old and the new. He cites as his greatest
personal problem: “How to form an idea and an attitude toward
this changing civilization.”

He is influential because he is grounded in tradition and speaks

( 348 ) The Arab Worlds

in die accustomed categories of thought, yet he is aware and in-
formed on modem problems. His intellectual lineage is that articu-
lated by Muhammad ‘Abduh, Mufti of Egypt during Lord Cromers
administration and prototype of the Muslim seeking reform within
an Islamic framework:

To attempt reform by means of a culture of philosophy that is not
religious in character would require the erection of a new structure
for which neither material nor workmen are available. If the religion of
Muslims can work these ends and has their confidence, why seek for
other means? 43

The judge accepts this rationale, but he is no longer so con-
fident as 'Abduh was that it can work. He was pleased, for example,
that he had been able to serve nationalist ends by theological
means. With "a smile of satisfaction and reward” he described
his role “when the government thought of applying the inheritance
tax . . . we opposed it and we succeeded in our efforts and we told
them it is against Islamic law and tradition ... I feel that I did
my duty towards my country because then we were under the
British mandate and all the tax would go out of the hands and
benefit of my countrymen.” (The implication is that, under an
independent Arab regime, equal theological force could be applied
toward the opposite end.) But the Qadi is not completely happy
with the need to justify all activities in terms of religion. For
Islamic tradition is often at odds with the processes and products
of modern civilization.

Hence, it is not surprising that the judge's basic ambivalence
between Islam and the West is most apparent in his reflections
on the media. He has a radio and he listens both to news broad-
casts and to Koran readings; he is indeed among the rare Elite
respondents (14%) who mention the latter. His comments reveal
a desire to defend radio as an instrument for fostering both tradi-
tional and modem values:

To tell the truth, one gets mixed up from the many things he wants
to impart to the public. [I would give more] religious talks in order to
turn the people from being too materialistic. We can dwell on tire verse
from the Koran: “Material things are not eternal.” Moreover, one can
give talks over the radio and instruct the people about . . . literature
and health.

Newspapers should perform a similar function. The judge feels

Jordan: One State with Two Peoples ( 349 )

that they serve a didactic purpose, that they are means of com-
munication of thought between highly educated writers -such as
those on Falastin - and the rest of the population. If he were
editor, he would run a party paper that "would lead to progress-
education and the raising of social standards.”

But it is with regard to the cinema that the conflict is most
apparent. The Qadi is not a movie-goer, though he is bemused by
the cinema. He once saw a movie, twenty years earlier, and
apologizes by explaining that he was compelled to go for occupa-
tional reasons:

You see, I personally do not feel like it, but I have a position which
many look to as a religious authority. . . . You see, I had to know what
a cinema looks like as many people talked of it and I believe as a
Judge of legislation I should know about new tilings.

Hie professional obligation, however, in the end turns out to con-
strict an intense personal interest. The Qadi is a prisoner of the
tradition which he feels obliged to represent. Confiding in the
interviewer (because the latter was a friend of his son and a
Christian), the Qadi admitted that he feels restrained by the con-
ventional Muslim norms which his followers expect him to uphold.
His personal dilemma involves those public choices between Mecca
and mechanization which are crucial for the Middle East elites,
particularly those who wish to gain modernity without losing the
traditional Arab-Mush'm syndrome:

Although I do not know why and how it came to be as such, but
traditionally people are used to look at us— people in religious clothing—
as carriers of the flag of tradition. In their own way of thinking about
us they rule for us, through time and tradition, the line we should follow.
. . . Frankly, I see no harm to see a good and well made film. Take,
for instance, the film of The Thief of Baghdad. My son says it invoked
in him the feeling of hope towards the glory of the Arab Caliphs. When
he was telling me about it, I also remembered the greatness of the
Abbnssid Caliphs. ... {I went to the movies] twenty years ago, doing
so with the saying, "to know something is better than ignorance about it.”

But he has not gone back since.

On the Margins

Iran: In a Bipolar World

“Never did reformer take
Passion’s way.

But that both worlds he must stake
In the play."

—Saadi

GEOGRAPHY set Iran’s destiny as a gambit in contests
among great nations-'Persia Among The Powers.” Says one his-
torian: “The modern era for Persia may be considered to have
opened with the rise of Russia and the pursuing by Peter the
Great of policies aimed at extending Russian rule to the Persian
Gulf.” 1 If one starts from the first Russian war in 1804, under the
reign of Fath Ali Shah, the modem era in Iran is designed by the
criss-cross of Russian ambitions and Western counterpoints. 2 Iran’s
internal evolution has been cut to the pattern of her external de-
pendence, following the move-and-check sequence played across
the Iranian plateau by the great powers. Iranian modernization
today still follows the leads of external power.

1. Iran Between the Powers

The historic lines drawn in the contest between Imperial Russia
and Imperial Britain still shape the Iranian role. But today the
political arena is global, Russia is Soviet, and the Western spear-
head is in Washington. The familiar stakes of Persian geography
have been augmented by the flow of Iranian oil. This heightened
interplay as subject and object of global politics explains why
Iran has so seldom, in the cold war era, been far outside the spot-
light of world attention. The current interaction between external
stakes in Persian oil and geography with the internal process of
social change in Iran merits consideration.

( 354 ) On the Margins

Warm. Waters and Crude Oil: Russia’s historic search for warm
waters inevitably took the southerly direction. Contained in the
north by frozen Arctic seas, in the east by Siberian wastes, in the
west by the ramparts of modem Europe, the course of Russian
empire led southward to the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean.
Effectively blocked from passage to the former through the Turkish
Straits, she only prized more highly the alternative route through
the Persian Gulf.

Britain’ s interest in denying Russia access to the Mediterranean
and the Gulf followed from her permanent, almost obsessional,
concern with the imperial Lifeline. The Gulf was used merely as
a way-station between British Channel and Indian Ocean, but it
figured also as essential link in an alternate Tigris-Euphrates route
of egress from the Mediterranean— should Suez and the Red Sea
ever fall. So powerfully did the Lifeline image work upon British
geopolitical thinking that inalienable control of the Persian Gulf
became a fixed condition of imperial policy.

A century of war and diplomacy aimed at Russia went to
maintain British primacy. The main concession to Russian ambition
was acquiescence in the conversion of the Caspian Sea into a
Russian lake. But Soviet policy, while welcoming the Caspian
fisheries, never renounced the larger design of Russian imperialism.
When the Soviets joined with the Nazis to carve out a Eurasian
“new order,” Secret Protocol No. I of the Four-Power Agreement
signed on November 26, 1940 began: “The Soviet Union declares
that its territorial aspirations center south of [its] national territory
in the direction of the Indian Ocean.” 3 The postwar Azerbaijan
maneuver, the tours of Bulganin-Krushchev and Mikoyan-Saburov,
signify that the USSR has not renounced the traditional goals of
Russian expansionism. But the old stakes have grown more weighty.
Soviet presence in the Persian Gulf today endangers more than
the British Lifeline. It gives the Soviets access to Asia Minor and
North Africa; and therewith the posture for an envelopment action
against the whole of Western Europe. That is why the American
purse and power have now become available when British primacy
has faltered.

Moreover, the modem West has become an oil civilization.
Without the lubricants derived from petroleum, the wheels of
Western life would grind to a halt. Mobility is the condition of
modem enterprise and oil is prerequisite to movement. Some

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 355 )

equivalent of a Berlin-to-Baghdad lifeline has become essential
for every industrial nation of the modem West— e.g., the calamity
which befell the Nazi Luftwaffe in World War II was not unrelated
lo flic failure of the Drang n ach Osten. This is not likely to change
until some distant day when nuclear energy has replaced oil as
the major means of mobility. Hence, there was consternation in
the West when Dr. Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company (AIOC) in March 1951, forced its British operators
from Iran, and thereby halted its daily flow of 700,000 barrels at
a critical phase in Western rearmament. Domestic production in
the U. S. and in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq was accelerated
so rapidly that 1951 world production exceeded the previous year’s
by 460 million barrels. Thus the West reinsured itself against ex-
treme dependence on Iranian oil.

But the West still needed the Iranian buffer to Soviet pene-
tration of the Persian Gulf, which could compromise Western
access to its other and possibly irreplaceable oil sources. Oil and
geography thus conjoined as strategic necessities in a bipolar world.
Stated concisely: “Any optimistic outlook for the free world rests
on the availability to the NATO nations of adequate supplies of
petroleum at all times and under any circumstances.” 4 The oil
image has become the nightmare of Free World policy as once the
Lifeline image was of British policy. But there are genuinely new
elements in the old game, which may prove decisive for social
change in Iran.

New Bottles— New Wine? It was a Persian poet who pointed out
that old wine may be poured in new bottles. The old geopolitical
stakes in Iran have received a new bipolar packaging. What effect
have these external rearrangements upon the internal processes of
Iranian life?

While Russian designs still supply a central theme of Iranian
politics, Russian policy today is armed with the specifically Soviet
instrument of a world Communist movement operating in each
country according to Soviet requirements. The Tudeh Party is a
genuinely new ingredient in Iran's world posture. Through its
organization ancient grievances and new demands in the internal
. Iran f can be channeled into a position of maximum leverage
on issues of world policy. The collaboration of the Tudeh with

J Kt « ° ul fte AI0C ' TO *

( 358 ) On the Margins

The classic counterpoint to fear of Russian ambitions has always
been, for Iranian diplomacy, reliance upon some protector in the
West. The usual big brother was Britain, but there was room for
maneuver. In 1808, with Britain and Russia jointly engaged by
Napoleonic maneuvers, Persia joined France in a campaign aimed
at both— directly at Russia and also (with Napoleonic wile) at
Britain in India. A century later, as Britain seemed ready to con-
cede Tsarist supremacy in northern Iran for Russian support against
the Triple Alliance, the diplomats at Tehran turned from “Per-
fidious Albion” to Berlin for protection against their ancient Russian
enemy.

In the traditional game, then, “the West” was composed of
highly competitive nations among whom, as one protector deserted
her to seek Russian favor, Persia could choose another. The rules
of the game have changed under the discipline of bipolarity. The
Baghdad Pact raises Iranian balance-of-power politics to a global
level. As the European nations no longer compete against each
other with Russia as a balancing power, but rather form a Western
bloc coordinated against a Soviet bloc, Tehran is likewise obliged
to deal with "the West” as its protector. The terrain has expanded,
while Iran’s space for maneuver has shrunk. What changes of
political style have accompanied this new structure of the world
arena?

One type of change, under the rule of bipolarity, is the effort
to eliminate the cruder forms of profiteering developed under the
old imperialism. Before it was expropriated the AIOC provided
the British government, which owned a 52% interest, with its
greatest single source of revenue and was regarded as a pork
barrel. The American government, deriving no part of its revenue
from Iranian oil, regarded the issue as a powder keg. American
intervention in the dispute led to an agreement which gave the
Iranian government a far larger share in oil revenue than it had
previously enjoyed. This represented a shift from colonial to cold
war perspectives, from economic to political goals, from coercive
to persuasive means. 5

The impact of this new Great Power style is visible in recent
Soviet practice as well. The Irano-Soviet Fisheries Company pro-
vided over the past quarter-century as rapacious a model of im-
perialist economics as the AOIC, with a measure of chicanery
added. The Fisheries Convention of 1927 provided for equal shares

Iron: In a Bipolar World ( 357 }

of world proceeds from Soviet marketing of caviar bred by Caspian
sturgeon in Iran's territorial waters. Hie USSR ignored its stipula-
tion for a rotating director, chief accountant, and chief engineer.
By keeping these posts in Russian hands, the USSR managed to
keep the profits in the same place. Whereas Iranian sources com-
puted the Company's annual earnings at about $2 million, the
actual sums received by the Iranian government annually averaged
about $ 25,000 (1/40 of the amount due). 0 Recent negotiations
sponsored by the USSR suggest that the Soviets too have recon-
sidered whether this game is worth the candle. As the primacy of
politics over economics is acknowledged, $1 million a year more
or less comes to seem relatively trivial. The solicitude for genuine
friendliness among the Iranian population, rather than mere ac-
quiescence by its government, is quite new. As late as 1943, the
allied Big Three felt free to bold their momentous conference in
Tehran without the invitation, or indeed the prior knowledge, of
Iranian officials. 7 Today such behavior might seem bad form.

Some new wine there doubtless is in these new bottles. The
Baghdad Pact’s MEDO— Middle East Defense Organization— is
a case. Whatever its military' value (and current depreciations may
be as excessive as were earlier expectations), MEDO does possess
psychic dignity. Unlike the regional security' foreshadowed in the
Sa'dabatl Pact of 1937, it brings great powers of the West into
reciprocally-binding arrangements with the regional powers. Hence,
whatever its impact upon Soviet designs or the Cairo calculus, the
impulse underlying MEDO is likely to reshape the social structure
of its participants. How much of the new wine of national autonomy
can Iran take?

The Insecurity Elite: Aspirations toward autonomy are quickly
raised, but the lifevvays of dependence die hard. In a land habituated
to defining itself in terms of those outside powers which, at any
given moment, threaten or protect it, there develops a chronic
instability'. Tin's diffuses certain traits of insecurity, which have
cumulated in an Iran immobilized by a closed elite through many
centuries. A recent monograph on the Iranian economy concludes:

The background is Insecurity: the insecurity of the landlord against
the caprice of the government, insecurity in the face of attack by hostile
elements, whether internal factions or foreign invasion, and the insecurity
of the cultivator vis-d-vi$ the landowner and others. The law was not
backed by a predominant and impartial force; effective power therefore

( 358 ) On the Margins

rested with whoever wielded the greatest force and, in the absence of
control by the law, the exercise of this force depended almost entirely
on personal caprice. Insecurity is no less the keynote at the present day
than in the past. 8

Chronic insecurity breeds distrust. Government becomes a
game of intrigue played by those who can pay the stakes. An elite
forms with no claim to power but its purse— the machinery of
Iranian politics being, according to Miss Lambton, “the relatively
large sums of money which are at the disposal of the privileged
classes .” 9 Politics by bribery among the few usually implies politics
by blackmail against the many. The Iranian peasantry, cowed by
ignorance and fear, has traditionally maintained a stolid indifference
regarding maneuvers in Tehran.

A frequent outcome, in nonparticipant social systems governed
by a closed elite reliant upon intrigue and coercion, is the wide-
spread diffusion of mendacity as an acceptable mode of self-de-
fense against the mighty. Every army has some such phrase as
“to lie like a trooper” and every autocracy has tended to produce
a similar code among its subject peoples . 10 In the Ottoman Empire
there flourished the code of ketman, whereby people spared them-
selves difficulties over their beliefs by simply disavowing them at
appropriate moments . 11 The Persian Empire, home-based on Shi'ite
Muslims in a non-Shfite world, long ago developed the comparable
doctrine of taqiyeh or dissimulation. This permits a Shi'ite, in
danger by reason of his religion, to pretend that he is a Sunni, a
Christian, or a Jew as best serves his needs of self-defense. One
American authority has moderately observed: “The ramifications
of this practice extend beyond religion .” 12 While Western discus-
sions of taqiyeh have produced a net surplus of moral indignation
over careful description, the pervasiveness of mendacity is ac-
knowledged by Persians . 13 Taqiyeh has even been conventionalized
to deal with superior force on the level of top policy negotiations:

In view of Russian strength and Iranian weakness, the latter gov-
ernment . . . was compelled often to resort to almost every known
form of evasion in dealing with issues, which originated in Moscow.
Apparent naivete, circumlocution, dilatoriness, specious argument, mis-
understanding— these and numerous other techniques were employed by
Iranian officials. 14

Widespread mendacity as a mode of self-defense against a
chronically insecure environment makes for a highly unstable self-

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 339 )

system. Indeed the Persians arc, according to Professor Frye, a
“people of extremes’* and a basic condition of modernization is
to remedy “the Persians lack of confidence in Ins fellow man.” 13
Professor Hoskins notes the political relevance of "the character
and behavior of the Iranian peoples, xvho are as given to extremes
in temperament as their habitat is full of contrasts.” 10 The extremist
temperament leads to extremist politics, in which violence and
the frenzy of mobs play a role. This makes conduct of a moderate
polity exceedingly difficult, particularly within the limited margins
for maneuver left by current world politics. No longer can Tehran,
when Britain and Russia seem ready to lay Iran on the sacri-
ficial altar of their joint convenience, counterpoint by ad hoc
arrangements with France or Germany. "East” and “West” are
now solid blocs. Tehran has been obliged to make a net choice
between the two world constellations.

When domestic violence adjudicates world issues, the politics
of the mob requires systematic supervision. Certain social forma-
tions take over the distinctive function of mediating messages,
including calls to action, between elite and mass. Added to the
traditional relay chains of bazaar merchants and itinerant ped-
dlers are the modem message centers manned by the new-style
intelligentsia in government, education, mass communication. Pre-
occupied with the play of power, they claim in return larger shares
in the process of decision than a closed elite in a non -growth
economy can accommodate. Those deprived of what they consider
their due, under the rule of things-as-they-are, often turn from
the course of moderation to stake their chances (having nothing
to lose but their claims) on extremist action. Operating against the
center from both extremes of the political spectrum, these ex-
tremists limit the scope of moderate governance. By maintaining
mob rule in the streets, they can reduce any government to coun-
ter-violence or impotence. One horn of this dilemma is Iiajji Baba’s
ancient formula; "Our kings must be drinkers of blood and slayers
of men to be held in estimation by their subjects and surrounding
nations.” The other horn is surrender.

This cycle of Iranian politics was exhibited in the great postwar
crisis symbolized by Mossadegh. By coalescing the extremist fac-
tions around his leadership, backing the slogans of radicalism with
the techniques of assassination and mob violence, Dr. Mossadegh
was able to destroy a moderate government, force the Shah into

( 360 ) On the Margins

flight, and install himself in power. As the inherent instability < *
governance by violence in turn undermined his own controls, Iran
tottered on the bipolar verge. The balance was restored only by
a vigorous coup organized by the army. Violence countered vio-
lence. The rule of terror— not of principle or policy— decided the
course of events.

The survey of Iranian attitudes was made at a propitious mo-
ment. Iranian extremism had long focused on the AIOC. Passage
of the oil nationalization bill in March 1951, and the overt dis-
play of British resistance to it, had raised to fever pitch the anti-
British sentiment common to all varieties of political extremism
in Iran. The Nationalist interest in driving out the foreign over-
lords was obvious; the Communist ( Tudeh ) interest followed
logically from its permanent alliance with the USSR. United be-
hind Mossadegh, who incorporated the stirring symbolism of inde-
pendence in a strategy of violence that released ancient hatreds
and repressions, political extremism toolc control of Iran. In the
crucial months of this crisis— May to July 1951— the interviews
were collected. They provide a rare gallery of political self-portraits,
painted at a moment when cumulative tensions had reached a
critical phase.

2. The Struggle at Home

Underlying the chronic tensions of Iran, as of other Middle
East lands, is the great gap between aspirations and capabilities.
The desires for national independence, social justice, personal pride
of place— these have been stirred among Iranians by the same gusts
of ideology that have dispersed the symbols of modernity over all
the lands of the earth. A “backward land” becomes an “under-
developed country” when these winds of doctrine have inseminated
a substantial portion of its population with the aspiration toward
a modem style of life for themselves and their fellows.

Sloiv Starts and Extremist Goals: A modem society must know
enough about itself to plan its probable future course in terms of
trends from the past to the present— social science being, in this
sense, a distinctive “feedback” mechanism required for modem
governance. Iran does not know the distribution of its popula-
tion, nor even its approximate total size. Population estimates
range from 15 to 20 million— with a consensus around the median

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 361 }

figure of 17-18 million. 17 This population occupies a total area of
628,000 square miles, a territory larger than all of western Europe.
As no official census has ever been taken, estimates of population
density are partial and unreliable. But Iran clearly is not over-
populated, with density averaging about 27 per square mile over
total area and (excluding desert) about 41 for inhabited areas.
Density varies from a high 70-95 in the Caspian provinces to less
than five in the southern regions, 18 Nor is there any early prospect
of overpopulation. While actual rates of fertility, mortality, and
morbidity are unknown, the birth rate has been estimated at
30/1000, which is low for the Middle East. With infant mortality
estimated as high as 500/1000 live births, and average rural life
expectancy at 27 years, net natural increase is relatively slow. 10

Population distribution shows little regional mobility or ur-
banization, There ore over 40,000 villages in Iran housing about
GO* of the population, with another 10% living in migratory tribes.
The 30% of townspeople are about equally divided between smaller
towns, cities over 50,000 and Tehran. Rural resettlement during
the past decade has been mainly toward larger cities. The popu-
lation of Tehran alone doubled, in the period 1940-1950, to over
one million. 00 These urban migrants, in Iran as in Egypt, encounter
unemployment, undercompensation, and the miserable conditions
of slum life. For there are few signs of a growth phase in the
Iranian economy. Without industrial expansion, the movement of
discontented and deprived thousands to cities augurs not economic
growth hut political instability.

The ecology of Iran provides optimum conditions for the prev-
alence of extremism. The population is dispersed around the vast
desert, in villages isolated by inadequate or nonexistent commu-
nications. They remain locked in the ancient round of daily life,
eking from their old soil with their antique tools (some antedating
the Christian era) their immemorial produce. Regarding tire new
world stage, on which their national drama now unfolds, they are
uninformed and uninvolved.

A striking result of the survey, made at fever pitch of the most
profound crisis which has racked postwar Iran, is that a sub-
stantial proportion of the population was unaware and even unin-
terested. When the interviewers asked about the most important
problem facing them and the nation, they responded in the man-
ner of Traditionals in all places and times. Their concerns were

( 362 ) On the Margins

not the nationalization of AIOC and expulsion of the British, nor
the contest between Dr. Mossadegh and the Shah, nor the future
alignment of Iran within the Soviet or Western worlds. Salient were
the familiar concerns of the daily round— ranging from major
problems of survival (health and livelihood) to trivial details of
family life.

Sharply contrasted with this remote and inarticulate mass was
the small group whose personal involvement with the national
crisis was profound. These persons cared deeply about public
affairs, vibrating to the day’s headlines with the intense affectivity
of a farmer hearing news of his sick calf or a mother of her soldier-
son. When asked what were their main private and public prob-
lems, these Modems could scarcely differentiate between them,
so deeply had they incorporated the symbols of political identify.
By contrast with the apathetic mass, these highly-involved persons
expressed an urgent need to impart to others their concern with
public issues, a compulsion to “do something about it.” This agi-
tational disposition among a small frustrated corps is a distinctive
mark of revolutionary extremism, just as the less intensive mode of
“participation” by a massive contented electorate is a mark of
democratic moderation. The mark of extremism is highly visible
in Iran.

Non-Growth and Counter-Elite Formation: In each Middle
Eastern land, we have seen, the political drama is played by a
small cast of characters with the mass as chorus. As the wheel of
social change turns, new aspirants come forward eager for a role
downstage center. How the traditional elite will handle these aspir-
ing young is a key question for the changing social structure:
will they be incorporated in new sub-elites or alienated into
counter-elite formation?

Incorporation is no easy task in a non-growth economy. Iran
develops few of those constantly growing and changing occupa-
tional roles which embody young men in the elite structure. The
clergy, the military, the bureaucracy— all these are charges on
the public treasury, already overburdened and scarcely capable
of expansion. The teaching corps is pitifully inadequate, but un-
likely to multiply opportunities until Iran develops a modernizing
economy in which literacy is an essential skill. Without an expand-
ing business sector, there is little room for the lawyer and account-
ant, for the specialist in industrial management or labor relations,

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 363 )

for the insurance broker or the investment manager, for the account
executive or the public relations counsel. Advertising is stillborn
and the mass media abortive. Where, in Iran, is “the man in the
gray flannel suit”? Whatever his unpopularity among Westerners
wearied by opinion brokers, in Iran he would be a more useful
stimulus to modernization than the agitational intellectual in a
hairshirt of vivid hue.

Given its limited absorptive capacity, Iran suffers from an over-
production of intellectuals. In a society about 90% illiterate, several
thousand young persons go through the classical routines of
higher education each year. Learning no skills that can be pro-
ductively employed, these collegians seek outlets in the symbol-
manipulating arts toward which their humanistic studies have
oriented them. Their effort supplies a poignant instance of usable
training rendered useless by its social environment— newspapers
without readers that last a week or a month, film companies that
never produce a film. The mass media, as distinctive index of the
Participant Society, flourish only where the mass has sufficient
skill in literacy, sufficient motivation to share “borrowed experi-
ence," sufficient cash to consume the mediated product. In Iran
the mass media are anemic and with them, annually, die a thou-
sand hopes.

Meanwhile Iranian higher education continues to overproduce
intellectuals as noted in this ironic comment:

The existing school system has been relatively successful in accom-
plishing the aims of its founders three-quarters of a century ago, which
were to produce a distinguished intellectual elite and to establish an
instrument by which the thoughts and actions of the common people
might be efficiently manipulated. 21

A decade later, while “die secondary schools have produced gradu-
ates who apparently are not fitted for anything but to continue
their schooling or to enter teaching,” the collegiate population con-
tinues to rise. In the two-year period after 1946, a 50% increase
brought the number of university students to 6,525. Adding to
these another 2,000 abroad for higher education, one perceives
that young intellectuals are being produced in quantities far
exceeding Iran’s capacity to consume.

Identifying the Extremists: All dressed up with no place to go,
these frustrated young men go looking for excitement. It is they
who form the hard core of political extremism in Iran today. This

( 364 ) On the Margins

was indicated by the 1951 survey and confirmed by subsequent
interviews which the author conducted in Tehran four years later,
The political extremists were consistently the most Modem group
in the Iranian sample. As in the other countries, so in Iran. The
higher a respondent ranked on die scale of media behavior the
more likely he was also turban, educated, well-off, and highly em-
pathic. Controlled sampling had apportioned five men for each
woman, three radio listeners for each non-listener, two urban for
each rural resident; over half were relatively well-off by Iranian
standards. But even among this preponderandy Modem sample,
the Extremists differentiated themselves as a relatively homogene-
ous group.

The whole sample was classified along a continuum of political
attitudes, located first by orientation as Left-Center-Right and
then by intensity as low-moderate-extreme. Each person was classi-
fied by his response to these four questions:

( 1 ) What would you say is the biggest problem that Iran as a
nation faces today?

(2) What can people like yourself do to solve this problem?

(3) Suppose you could suggest anything you wanted to our
government— what are some of the things you would tell
them?

(4) What is the biggest problem that people in die same cir-
cumstances of life as you face? What can you do about
solving it?

Responses were differentiated by die key symbols around which
they were organized: Person, Class, Nation. Those responding in
purely personal terms were classified as Apolitical. Respondents
who defined problems in terms of Class— e.g., poverty, illiteracy,
feudalism— and proposed solutions requiring social reform were
classified as Left. Those preoccupied with problems of National
aspiration requiring national action were classified as Right.

As in Syria, classification was based on the complete problem-
solution sequence. Of two respondents naming “poverty” as the
main problem, the one proposing to solve it by redistributing
wealth was classified Left, the other solving it by 'Tacking out the
foreigners” was classified Right. Similarly, if the problem was
“disunity,” the one proposing to solve it by “punishing the land-
lords” was sorted Left; if his solution was “strengthen the Army

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 365 )

he was marked Right Attitudes toward the symbol NATION were
usually consistent and decisive: the Left emphasized national obli-
gations to the people, the Right individual responsibility to the

M Respondents both Left and Right were then sorted into three
levels of intensity indexed by: (1) personal involvement in public
problems; (2) violence of proposed solutions to these problems.
All respondents had been asked whether they considered them-
selves happy or unhappy— and why. Those who specified public
problems as reasons for their unhappiness were classified as more
involved, others who cited only family or other personal problems
as less involved. Those who proposed such solutions as “hanging
the landlords” or "overthrowing the government” were classified
as more violent; others as less violent. The extremist Revolutionary
Left was both involved and violent; the Middle Left was either
involved or violent but not both; the Reform Left was neither.

To determine intensity among Right respondents, who were
mainly preoccupied with National problems, a variant of this index
was used. A respondent was considered involved if he expressed
willingness to undergo personal deprivations for the achievement
of national goals; if not he was considered less involved. Violence
was indexed by the advocacy of aggressiveness against foreigners.
A person who wanted to "destroy Britain” was classified as vio-
lent; one who merely wanted to "defend Iran against Britain” was
not. The extreme Nationalistic Right was both involved and vio-
lent; the Middle Right was either but not both; the Conservative
Right was neither. In this typology of political attitudes respond-
ents distributed as shown in Table 1.

of Inn C ;n AP °S iCal S J r ° UP re P resents passive uninvolved mass

Iranians; the moderate groups on both sides include the tradi-

Table 1— Distribution of Political Types

foimcoi t rp*
*«votulioncry Left
Middle Left
Worm Left
Apolitical

ComervatWe Right
WWdle Right
Nolionolijtic Right

% of Respondents
12 %

14

18

7

29

10

10

100%

No. of Cases
29
33
42
16
69
22
23

234

( 366 ) On the Margins

tional elite that has governed Iran over past decades; the extremists
represent those newer formations that in Iran, as in the Arab lands
are using their access to the mass to challenge the traditional elites.
The latter form those potential counter-elites whose influence upon
the mass may be decisive for the duration, tempo, and balance of
the modernizing processes at work in the area. This is why, despite
their small numbers and lack of statistical significance, the data
on extremism may clarify the interplay of communication and
social change in shaping Iranian Iifeways.

3. The Structure of Iranian Extremism*

The ideologies of Iranian extremists present themselves as
sharply opposed. They espouse different causes, command differ-
ent layers of loyalties, and appeal to different sets of sentiments.
The Tudeh Party, a lightly camouflaged Communist movement
which speaks for the Revolutionary Left, and the extremely na-
tionalistic Pan-Iranian Party regard each other as mortal enemies.
Underlying the symbolic divergence of the party ideologies, how-
ever, there is a remarkably similar sociology of party ideologists.
The recruitment and composition of leadership at these schismatic
extremes appear to follow the same process.

Sociology of Extremism: At both ends of the political con-
tinuum, Extremists register consistently higher on the sociological
indices of the Participant style. Thus, while the sample was 20%
female, the Extremists are exclusively male. Further, while the
sample contained equal numbers over and under thirty years old,
a disproportionate share of the younger persons are Extremists.
It is no news that younger men tend more frequently than their
elders of either sex toward extreme political positions. In Iran
they move toward both extremes, and are mainly recruited from
the same sociological environment as the ruling elite. A stable
social structure, operating under a consensual elite, would absorb
many of these vigorous young men into governance rather than
alienate them into counter-elite extremism.

Consider urbanism, the index which makes the profound initial

0 This section is based on the 1952 BASR report "The Political Extremes
in Iran,” by B. B. Ringer and D. L. Sills. See also their “Political Extremists
in Iran,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter 1952-53). (As 18 cases were
added after these reports appeared, there are differences in percentages,
usually minor.)

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 367 )

cleavage between elite and mass in Iran as elsewhere. By compari-
son with the Apoliticals, as in Table 2, both varieties of extremism
arc highly urban.

Table 2 — Urbanism

Extreme

i*n

Apolitical

Extreme
1 t/ffit

Thoi# In urban oreoi now who weret

rolled In urban creai

73%

37%

73%

rolled In rural area*

16

13

18

thoie In rural area t now who werei

railed In urban areat

0

13

0

railed in rural areai

11

37

9

At both extremes three of every four were raised and still live
in cities, as compared with one of three Apoliticals. Whereas 13%
of the latter raised in a city have since moved to the country, not a
single Extremist at either end has forsaken urban for rural pleas-
ures. Clearly, the Extremists are urban.

Consider education, the next great cleaver between elite and
mass in the Middle East. When differentiated at the point of ef-
fective literacy— the passage from elementary into secondary school
—the results are shown in Table 3.

Table. 3 — Education

LEFT APOLITICAL SIGHT

f xtreme Middlt Moderate Modtrat * Mlddl* Extra me

39% 59% 53% 81% 56% 27% 25%

61 41 47 19 44 73 75

'Hie Right is better educated than the Left. But the progression
away from both sides of the Apolitical Center is more striking.
What the Extremists have in common, compared with current
elite as well as the mass, is that they are better educated. Consider,
in Table 4, the index of socioeconomic status (SES).

Table A— SES

LIFT APOLITICAL SIGHT

CrHtm* Mlddl* Modtrat* Modtrat* MiddU Extreme

6% 18% 12% 57% 17% 14% 9%

7 * 6S 55 36 68 71 82

16 17 33 7 15 14 9

SIS

Poor

Moderate
WtU of!

frfocotfen

Elementary or ten
Setondaryor higher

( 368 ) On the Margins

Poverty prevails only among the Apolitical mass. The politically-
involved respondents are better-off. Their lot improves as they
move toward the extremes— up to a certain point. A lower propor-
tion of Extremists than others is in the poor group, but the highest
proportion is in the moderate (not wealthy) group. The data ob-
viate die conventional assumption that the Extremists are simply
the “have-nots,” suggesting rather that they are the “want-mores.”
They oppose the current “system” not because they have no stake
in it but because, on a range of social values, they want more
than they get.

Illustrative are Extremist responses to the question whether
they were happy about their lot in life. As unhappiness had been
used to classify Left Extremists, in this analysis the Extreme Left
is unhappy by definition. Distribution of responses on the Eight
demonstrate, in Table 5, a comparable prevalence of unhappiness
among the Extremists.

Table 5 — Happiness on the Right

Apolitical

Moderate

Right

Middle

Right

Extreme

Right

Happy

61%

56%

57%

29%

Unhappy

39

44

43

71

What makes the Extremists so much unhappier than their fel-
lows is that they “want more” and believe they deserve more— i.e.,
that the society has not done as well by them as it should. While
they have more education than the ruling group, for example, they
have less money. Far from poverty themselves, they talk about the
poor while their eyes are on the rich. This produces the phenome-
non of “relative deprivation,” whereby a person’s discontent with
his lot is set by the standard to which he aspires. His expectations
determine whether a person feels that life has indulged or deprived
him.

To check this attitude, each respondents spontaneous refer-
ences to economic matters were sorted into two categories: descrip-
tive and deprivational. A doctor talking without affect about pub-
lic health programs, a farmer about the relation of weather to
crops, a business man about the costs of production— all such were
classified as descriptive references. Counted as deprivational were
statements reflecting the individual’s dissatisfaction with his share

Iran: In a Bipolar ‘World { 369 )

of tlie national wealth. Included were general references to the
economic status quo which indicated personal frustrab'on-e.g.,
poverty, unemployment, economic insecurity. Where dcprivational
outnumbered descriptive statements by 5 to I, the respondent was
classified as highly dcprivational, with results shown in Table 6.

Table 6 — High Deprivation

Uft

Middlt

l.ft

Modarat *
tail

Modarote

Right

Mlddla

Right

Extreme

Kfcto

80%

45%

29%

33%

36%

66%

While the saliency of deprivation is more frequent on the Left
than the Right, there is a clear progression toward the extremes at
both ends. Tlu's common attitude underlies their common posture
toward the national community. This posture we call alienation
and its widespread occurrence among Iranian Extremists on both
sides merits consideration.

Psychology of Extremism— Alienation: Counter-elites typically
dissociate themselves from the governing elite and its institutions.
"Wo or they” is the classic rhetoric of dissociation. It symbolizes
the counter-elite’s partial or total transfer of participation from the
current institutions of governance to competitive institutions under
their own management— secret societies, clandestine networks of
communication, illegal political parties (or legal parties controlled
by a covert apparatus). If their withdrawal into covert institu-
tions is successful, the counter-elite then uses these bases to re-
enter the arena of public participation for the purpose of subversion.

In Iran, the 1951 survey showed tin’s subversion process in
operation. While it is no part of our purpose to study political or-
ganization, the interviews do reveal pervasive dissociation from
current institutional life among Extremists. In the next section we
shall describe the ideological formulas invoked to justify their
alienated posture. Here we note only the frequent occurrence of
its psychic manifestation, namely dissociation from the major in-
stitutionalized orbits of social life. An Index of Social Dissociation,
using the following items, provided the relevant data:

1. Lack of family tics. Those single at normal age-range for mar-
riage: also those divorced, separated, or widowed, who have not
remarried.

2. Lade of religious tics. Those who state that religion is of little or
no importance, and rarely or never attend the mosque.

( 370 ) On the Margins

3. ' Limitation of friendship ties. Those who prefer to have few friends

rather than many.

4. Individualistic recreational patterns. Those who prefer solitary
rather than interactional recreations (e.g., visiting, conversation).

When respondents having more than two of these attributes were
scored as highly dissociated, the distribution in Table 7 was ob-
tained.

Table 7 — High Dissociation

LEFT APOLITICAL RIGHT

Extreme Middle Moderate Moderate Middle Extrema

75 % 45 % 38 % 13 % 28 % 41 % 51 %

Dissociation from the institutional structure, among Extremists,
paralleled its dissociation from the prevailing value-system. Very
striking, for example, was the extent of Extremist withdrawal from
religious participation. As Shntes, Iranian intellectuals historically
have shown a special religious concern. Withdrawal from the com-
munity of religious practice and sentiment is a profound matter.
Hence it is noteworthy that most Extremists score low on an index
of religious involvement. In their responses to the question how
important they considered religion to be in their daily life, and the
saliency of their spontaneous reference to religion, respondents
showing high religious involvement are grouped in Table 8.

Table 8 — High Religious Involvement

LEFT APOLITICAL RIGHT

Extreme Middle Moderate Moderate Middle Extreme

29 % 37 % 51 % 44 % 60 % 33 % 33 %

A further test of alienation was made by constructing a general
index of traditional reference. This classified and counted each
respondent’s spontaneous reference to traditional symbols— e.g.,
family, locale, religion, ethnic group— in discussing his views on
public policy. Fully twice as many at both extremes, compared
with the politicals, made no such traditional references whatso-
ever.

Extremist alienation from Iranian tradition is modulated by
their acquisition of more expansive perspectives. An index of social
horizons was constructed by noting the number and variety of

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 371 )

"reference groups” which each respondent mentioned spontane-
ously. The assumption underlying this index is that a person who
refers exclusively to a few familiar groups (family, community,
nation) thereby exhibits narrower horizons of social contact than
another whose discourse goes beyond these to include other, less
traditional reference groups (class and mass, great powers and
small, parties and politicians, eta). Scoring the number and variety
of their reference groups gave the distribution in Table 9 of re-
spondents exhibiting broad social horizons.

Table 9 — Broad Social Horizons

lirr APOLITICAL RIGHT

MJddl# Medttolt Modtrol* Middl* Bulrtmt

55 % 33 % 26 % 0 % 26 % 38 % 54 %

This suggests that detachment from the governing institutions
nnd dissociation from elite perspectives has not confined the Ex-
tremist within a narrow circle of purely personal activities and
interests. On the contrary, withdrawal from the traditional gov-
erning symbolism lias been accompanied by displacement of affect
onto a new set of symbols. The outcome has been not privatization,
hut extreme politization— ■ with the flow of political activity running
in separatist counter-elite channels.

This was suggested by the broader social horizons among
Extremists than their more moderate compatriots. But it was not
conclusive, since social horizon so defined could be achieved by
a social isolate, who might “interact” heavily in his fantasy life
but experience few real contacts in his daily round. The question
was whether Extremists really interacted so much more with others
in their daily lives, as their broader social horizons indicated. To
check the Participant Style in actual behavior, an index of social
interaction was constructed on tire basis of these three questions:

(1) Has anyone come to you for advice recently?

(2) Have you yourself gone to anyone for advice recently?

(3) Did you talk to anybody about this [new's item]?

Persons answering yes to two of these questions were scored as
socially active in Table 10.

Iranian Extremists, despite alienation from governing institu-
tions and perspectives, are actively engaged with their fellows.

( 372 )

On the Margins

Table

10 — Social Interaction

LEFT

APOLITICAL

RIGHT

Extreme

Middle

Moderate

Moderate

Middle

Extreme

45%

33%

12%

6% 20%

34%

46%

Indeed, this appears to be closely related to their political com-
mitment. To test whether this was so, respondents were divided
by education, which provides skills and opportunities that foster
contact among people. If only the better-educated persons in the
sample scored high on interaction, then no new relationship had
been estiblashed. Table 11 shows respondents scoring high on
interaction.

Table 11 — Social Interaction by Education and Political Type

LEFT APOLITICAL RIGHT

High Interaction With Extreme Middle Moderate Moderate Middle Extreme

High Education 60% 36% 21% 0% 33% 46% 55%

Low Education 30 31 5 6 11 17 35

Two findings emerge from this distribution. First, as expected,
well-educated people tend to be more interactive than poorly-
educated people. Second, and more significant, the relationship
between high interaction and political extremism exists regardless
of educational level. Even among the poorly-educated, Extremists
are more actively engaged with their fellows than Moderates. It is
not possible, from these data, to draw any chicken-or-egg conclu-
sion: that interactivity breeds extremism or vice versa. We can
conclude that the two “go together” and, whatever their psycho-
genetic relationship, tend to reinforce each other.

The importance of this finding is highlighted by a final test,
designed to see whether high alienation (as scored on the earlier
index of social dissociation) in fact occurred among the same
persons as high interaction. If not, then we could not properly
speak of an “extremist syndrome,” but only of the high frequency
of two special traits among different individuals who happened to
share extremist political views. Cross-tabulating the two indices
produced the distribution in Table 12. The association between the
two traits, as we move toward the extremes, is very striking.
There seems to emerge a clear “extremist syndrome”— an under-
lying psychic structure of political extremism in Iran which com-

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 373 )

bines high dissociation from institutions and ideologies with a
high degree of , interaction among people.

Tliis syndrome is important for public communication because
H is the classic posture of the revolutionary agitator. Alienated from
die governing system, he goes forth among his fellows to preach
a new faith and gain loyalties for a new power. This mission is
performed by persons who have mastered the New Word, and
when political extremism enters this phase in any society' it usually
comes under the management of the alienated intelligentsia. In
later phases of the quest for power the revolutionary movement
is dominated by persons skilled in organizing techniques; but
during the earlier phase of recruitment by propagation, leadership
goes to Uiose trained in the manipulation of symbols.

Table 12 — Dissociation and interaction

LETT

APOLITICAL

RIGHT

Extreme

Middle

Moderate

Moderate

Middle

Extreme

Fenont with high

diuoclalion showing
high Interaction

67 %

42%

6%

0%

26%

50%

57%

Ptfiont with low

diuoclalion thawing
high interaction

0

27

16

7

18

31

17

This requires a corps habituated to the skills and channels of
the old elite— living and working in circumstances that provide
the time and opportunities needed for prop-agit work; educated
enough to formulate and diffuse the new ideologies. The Iranian
Extremists, who are mainly urban, professional, moderately well-
off, and well-educated, meet these sociological requirements. They
manifest also tire main psychological requirements— that they be
sufficiently alienated from the old elite’s perspectives and practices
to develop their own code, and sufficiently interactive with their
fellows to spread the new gospel through the society. The Ex-
tremists thus exhibit the characteristics that define radical opinion
leaders. That a majority of Extremists appear to be potential
leaders does not, of course, mean that a majority of Iran’s potential
leaders are Extremists. But if such a leader is detached from exist-
ing institutions (alienation), is receptive to new ideas (rejects
traditional for broader social horizons), is skilled in presenting
these ideas to others (highly educated), and is in regular contact

( 374 ) On the Margins

with his fellows (highly interactive) -then this type of leader is
found most frequently, in Iran, among the political Extremists.

The survey reveals, then, the existence of a maturing Iranian
counter-elite. As the sampling was originally controlled for other
purposes, and the number of Extremists relatively small, the data
permit neither inferences as to the present size of this revolutionary
corps nor extrapolations as to its growth-potential. What the find-
ings do show is that the logical structure of a revolutionary counter-
elite is already in being, and that its internal struggle for power is
inevitably linked to the bipolar external conflict between Commu-
nist and Free Worlds. At this point the Extremists diverge sharply
in matters of ideology— the cleavage reflecting in miniature the
bipolar division in the outer world, with the usual quota of quali-
fications imposed by local conditions.

In such a situation, where rival propagators of revolutionary
symbols are locked in ideological conflict, the questions that inter-
est students of communication concern content, technique, con-
ditions of sucess. What are the rivals selling? With what sales
technique? What market conditions favor the ones over the others?
We examine these questions in turn, starting with the competing
commodities— the rivahous ideologies.

The Ideologies of Extremism: The function of ideology is ex-
ceedingly complex. It requires clinical data of an order quite
different from that obtained by survey methods to make a complete
evaluation of the interaction between the public and private faces
of any person. But our results do contain some findings of con-
siderable suggestive value.

How ideology modifies perspective is illustrated by the diver-
gent images of their own countrymen held by the two extremes
of Iranian political sentiment. All respondents were asked what
words they would use to describe the people of Iran. A composite
description of an Iranian, as viewed by Left Extremists, presents
us with a poor, talented, intelligent, broad-minded, hospitable la-
borer. As perceived by Bight Extremists, he is patriotic, brave,
patient, faithful, chivalrous, intelligent, hospitable. Aside from the
consensus on intelligence and hospitality, the Extremists are talk-
ing about two consistently different sorts of person. The differences
recall our historical distinction between a traditional “courage
culture” and a modernizing “ingenuity culture.”

The main line of ideological cleavage ran along the axis of

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 375 )

CLASS versus NATION symbolism. The nationalist Right, in the
summer of 3951, was mainly preoccupied with expropriation of
the AlOC, thereby putting the British in their place and restoring
to Iran the glories of full national sovereignty. Their comments
on this specific issue provide a profile of their posture. The greatest
problem facing the nation is “the oil nationalization law,” said one
university teacher, and “to nationalize its oil, Iran will suffer death
against any aggression” (072).

The vocabulary of violent action against foreigners pervaded
the solutions to this problem offered by the extremist Right. Some
emphasized that the responsibility for such action rested with the
government, which "should kick all foreigners from Iran” (172)
or “should oust the foreigners and cut their hands from Iran" ( 175).
Others stressed the need for popular action: “[We must] cut the
English hands from Iran” (092) and “get the pirates out of Iran”
(021). Still others invoked joint action by elite and mass— e.g.,
the government should "let all the people fight for oil nationaliza-
tion.” (070)

Rightist attention was focused upon national aspiration and
action, with no consideration of possible class deviations from the
common goal. They simply assumed popular consensus behind the
symbols of national will. One government employee sought direct
action by the whole population: “All should be united and partici-
pate in demonstrations against the usurper oil company.” (192)
Another civil servant, who considered himself a ‘holy warrior,”
said simply: “There is nothing above shedding blood for the na-
tion, for which all Iranians are ready.” He had no doubts about
the universal readiness to struggle:

All the people of Iran are of a single, united opinion. Fifteen mil-
lion Iranians long for the day to sacrifice themselves for their country.
The solution can be achieved merely by blood-letting. (134)

This statement epitomizes the ideology of the Nationalistic
Right. Expressed here is the supremacy of national goals, the mys-
tique of national unity— an image of the big body politic in which
no class-sentiment can compromise the universal desire to sacrifice
oneself upon the altar of national aspiration. Furious indeed are
these Right Extremists against all who permit personal or class
desires to obstruct the course of national destiny. They call upon

( 376 ) On the Margins

tlie government “to punish internal traitors” (175)— for dissensus
in their eyes, can only be treason. And they Would “hang all the
country-sellers in one morning.” (134)

On the Rightist verdict, the trees of Iran would be well popu-
lated. For Leftist ideology, while enthusiastic about nationalization
and expropriating the British, locates these items in a different
battle order. On the Extreme Right, the goal is national sover-
eignty and the means is a unified national will; on the Extreme
Left, the goal is a classless society and the instrument is class-
struggle. Hence, even when the Extremists agree in identifying
Iran’s problems, they quickly diverge over appropriate solutions.
The Left regarded nationalization of AIOC as but one step among
several required to create a just society— and not necessarily the
most important step. In discussing this issue, the Left quickly
generalized its solution: “We should nationalize our industry,
dividing the lands which rich people would turn over to the gov-
ernment.” (106)

The same divergence appears when Extremists discuss poverty,
the other great commonly-recognized problem. The Rightists per-
ceive this as “the economic plight of Iran” and solve it by expro-
priating foreigners. The Leftists perceive it as “the suffering poor”
due to class inequality and exploitation, and solve it with a class
conception of Iranian society. “We should,” they say:

—“remove class discrimination by distributing the land among the peas-
ants.” (097)

—“give the right of every class to its own, so that the toilers would get
their own, and the capitalists would not ask for more.” (032)

—“take the idle money of the capitalists and exploit the mines in order
to solve our problems.” (061)

From these different perspectives on such common problems as
oil and poverty follow conflicting systems of loyalty, patterns of
organization, courses of action. The Right seeks national unity in
the struggle, to the point of bloodshed, directed primarily toward
the expulsion of Britain. Says one Extremist physician: “I wish
to see some day the British Isles completely overrun by water,
and not an Englishman living on the earth.” (092) Says another
Rightist, a civil servant: “If we could get the oil profits, we could
solve all our problems.” (074)

The Leftists waste no affection on Britain, but they locate her
on a different psychopolitical map of the world— not as personal

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 377 )

enemy of all Iranians, but as political symbol of decadent imperial-
ism: "Britain likes to have the whole world as her colonies; she has
colonizing policies in Iran” (188); “She wants to perpetuate her
colonizing policy in the world." (147) The Leftists consider that
colonialism maintains itself by alliance with the indigenous elite.
Accordingly, they regard “national unity” against the British as
a diversionary tactic (except, for the Tudeh Party, when this co-
incides with the requirements of Soviet foreign policy). Instead
they urge a clean break with existing institutions, and advocate a
struggle in which the blood that will be shed is Iranian blood.

Equally armed with their conflicting ideologies, equally
equipped by temperament and training for public agitation, it
remains for tire Extremists on both sides to position their internal
struggle with respect to the world bipolarity.

4. Bipolarity and International Communication

Most significant, for the general purpose of this study, is the
manner in which international communication complicates or re-
inforces the bipolar postures inside Iran. One process is illustrated
by a student, an articulate extremist of the Left, who dislikes cer-
tain Tehran newspapers because their editors “work for a group
of parasites and are servants of obnoxious imperialism.” He prefers
to get his news from Radio Moscow which exposes “the ominous
policies of stockholders, bankers, and brokers.” These broadcasts
reinforce the ideology of the Revolub'onaiy Left: “It wakes die
nation up, so we are not deceived by the pro-foreigners, parasites,
and the subservient ruling class of Iran." (147)

On die Right, the relationship between internal and external
polarities is complicated by the special hostility toward Britain.
Hence, the line of international communication from the West to
the non-Communist population is less direct than that from Mos-
cow to the Iranian Left. One government supervisor explains that
he does not like BBC programs “because they emphasize the serv-
ice which they believe they have rendered Iran, although in their
150 years of dominance they have done nothing except ruin the
entire political, social, moral, and economic structure of the
country” (162)

An additional complication derives from the subtle differen-
tiation in Rightist ideology between the beloved nation and the

( 378 ) On the Margins

detested elite— between the abiding state and the current govern-
ment. It is difficult to formulate this distinction clearly and per-
suasively, except in the name of some recognizable counter-elite
formation. Thus, the Leftists can make clear, when they seek to
subvert the ruling elite, that they propose to install their own gov-
ernance in the form of the Tudeh Party or some other recognizable
agency of revolution. The Right Extremists, on the other hand,
oppose to the solid substance of the current elite mainly the in-
corporeal symbolism of the nation— its mission, primacy, unity. The
Leftist advantage shows in their attitudes toward external com-
munications.

Bipolarity and Extremism : Frequently respondents were unable
to draw from their domestic political posture a definite choice
between the bipolarized superpowers. 10 While a substantial num-
ber of Leftists were not univocally pro-Russian, this was more
marked among Rightists who were not pro-American. But here an
extraordinarily interesting difference appeared: deviants from the
American side were mainly Right extremists; deviants from the
Russian side were mainly Left moderates.

This suggests a major modification of the conventional assump-
tion that pro-Americanism is Rightist and pro-Sovietism is Leftist.
The more exact formulation would be that pro-Sovietism goes with
extremism, pro-Americanism with moderation. We shall examine
the full implications of this finding in section 6 of this chapter.
Here we present die data on which it is based. The seven political
types were regrouped according to the intensity of their political
convictions— respondents on the extreme Left and Right combined
as "extremists,” middle Left and Right as “middle range,” Reform
Left and Conservative Right as “moderates.” These groups were
then cross-tabulated into the categories pro-Russian, pro-American,
Neutral. The distribution in Table 3 was obtained.

Table 13 — Bipolarity by Political Intensity

Pro-Russian Pro-American

Neutral

Extremists

40 %

7%

4%

Middle Range

28

25

24

Moderates

28

66

55

Apoliticals

4

2

17

Totals

100% (28)

100% (94)

100% (75)

° This section is based on
munication Behavior in Iran”

tire 1952 BASR report
by B. B. Ringer.

"Partisanship

and Com-

Iron.* In a Bipolar World ( 379 )

The pro-Russians arc more likely to be Extremists, whereas two
of every three pro-Americans are Moderates. The more intense
political involvement of the pro-Russians goes with the fact that
they arc a younger, better-educated, more active group. Compared
with the pro-Americans, 132 more pro-Russians are under 30 years
old, 232 more have had higher education, and 8 2 more score higher
on the index of social interaction.

By contrast, the pro-Americans are more numerous in the
sample. Of 157 who expressed judgments on both peoples, 70 2
scored as pro-Americans compared with 362 pro-Russians. On
judgments of the two governments, the margin was narrower but
still substantial: of 110 respondents, 502 were favorable to the
U.S. government, only 292 to the Soviet government. (That the
survey was American-sponsored, even though Iranians did all the
interviewing, probably biased these results.)

But the most striking feature in the attitudinal map of Iranian
bipolarity is the huge zone of nondifferentiation. Many Iranians
assign equal-values to both poles. This finding emerged when the
joint judgments of respondents on both American and Russian
peoples and governments were cross-tabulated in Table 14.

fob/# J4 — The Zone of Neutralization (Equal Values I

Atl/ludti*
fmvord
Amtrtam
favorobl*

Ambivaltnl
(ndiffgrenl
Unfavorable

* Votpandtfttt dliapproving ncifhtr people nor governments ore classified as
fovorobU; those dilapproving both are unfavorable; thole diiepprovlng either
but not both are omblvolent; those eipreising no lodgment ore Indifferent.

We have given the actual numbers above, rather than per-
centages, for die persons in several of these categories may be
regrouped with others to illustrate various points. For example,
all 95 respondents (472 of sample) above the diagonal line were
counted as pro-American on the view that each person in this po-
sition exhibits a less hostile view of the USA than of the USSR.
On du’s view the 28 Iranians (142) below the line are classed as
pro-Russian; and die substantial 78 respondents (392) on the di-
agonal are classed as Neutrals.

AUiiudet* fo*ro rd Rutslant

Favorable Ambivalent Indifferent Unfavorable

( 380 ) On the Margins

We note further that the process of equal-valuation does not
lead to the theme “bless you all” but rather to “a plague on both
houses.” Only three respondents were equally favorable to both
poles; over ten times as many were equally unfavorable. More-
over, hostility toward one pole does not imply a real preference
for the other. Thus, 52 of the respondents unfavorable toward Rus-
sia are ambivalent (partially unfavorable) or merely indifferent
toward America. If we consider these Iranians as effectively neu-
tralized by the bipolarizing process, then the proportion of genuine
Neutrals rises to 64% of the respondents— and this in a relatively
dynamic and participant sample of the total Iranian population.

Why are they hostile toward Russia? Some see the cold war
as a new name for the ancient geopolitical game: “Russia wants
to lock us up behind the Iron Curtain. She wants to get to the
Persian Gulf and develop her strategic position.” (134) Others
still think of money rather than strategy: “Russia wants the whole
world to become Communist. She has the same thought about
Iran, besides she has some financial interests in Iran.” (009) Still
others, recalling past cases where the Powers were quick to solve
their differences over Iran by dividing the cake, see the current
bipolarity as a new version of great-power conspiracy: “The Rus-
sians want to divide Iran between England and themselves.” (037)

Why are they hostile toward America? Here, be it noted, hos-
tility is less widespread and more qualified— it is the U.S. policy,
not the American nation, that draws fire. But the feeling is intense,
and underpinned by a sense of deception. American performance
has somehow not squared with Iranian expectations: “it has not
fulfilled its promises” (007); “ it has given many compliments
[talked too much] but has not shown any effective action” (006);
“she doesn’t do what she says.” (011) Beyond this, America in a
bipolar world has behaved just like every other Great Power-
handling Iran as just another strategic pawn on her global chess-
board. Thus: “America is thinking of its benefit all the time in any
country. It wants to make Iran a military base, but it wasn’t success-
ful yet.” (070) Or, more generally: “America works for its own
benefits. It pretends to be a friend of Iran, but its purpose is find-
ing some influence in Iran.” (061)

The sense of deception became acute during the AIOC crisis:
“Recently America has interfered against us and for the British
in the oil dispute— that is why all the people dislike America.

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 381 )

(026) But its effects upon pro-American sentiment appear to be
less profound than one might suppose. At the height of the crisis,
the interviewees were ashed: “Has your attitude changed any
£1 the past year toward the U.S.?” Those who responded affirm-
atively were then ashed: 'Would you say you felt more or less
favorable toward the U.S. today than you did a year ago? Why? 1
The same questions were asked regarding Russia, with results

shown in Table 15.

Table 15— Attitude Changes During Oil Crisis

Pro-Rustlani Pro-Americans

More favorable lo own side 68% 15%

leu favorable lo own side 8 25

No change 24 60

100% (25) 100% (70)

The most striking change was the proportion of pro-Russians
who declared that they had become even more pro-Russian. Given
the dialectical attitude of Communists toward public statements,
the relatively low evaluation of objectivity among Iranians, and the
difficult)' anyone has in self-appraisal, this is a type of declaration
that must be interpreted with considerable reserve. Even so, only
one of four pro-Americans declared himself less favorable to
America. Other evidence shows that American influence remained
strong enough, through the crisis, to modify unfavorable attitudes
toward the British. The reserve of good will which enabled pro-
Americanism, though shaken, to survive even the oil crisis was
formulated by one high school teacher:

Americans in general are freedom-loving people and at the same time
are prospered by conditions in their own country. Thus, their policies
toward other countries, including Iran, are favorable. But I am worried
that probably in a few cases drey have joined Britain to take steps
against foreign countries. This, however, is not proved to me yet. (024)

The lesson of the oil crisis is significant for our study. Pro-
Americanism did not founder, but it faltered and was slight!)
weakened. Pro-Sovietism, even with reserves made for purposeful
mendacity, apparently gained a massive consolidation among its
a lerents. This was largely a communication process— for mosi
raiuans Jiad little direct knowledge of events, but judged the

!f u . e were tQ )d” through the mass media and through

their informal networks of oral communication.

( 382 ) On the Margins

In these circumstances, it is important to understand why the
bipolar allegiances of so many respondents were effectively neu-
tralized. An important element is that the pro-Americans, while
more numerous than the pro-Russians, are more Moderate. They
take their political convictions more lightly, are more subject to
the seizures of ambivalence, and are more likely to weaken in the
presence of crisis. The pro-Russians, on the contrary, are Extrem-
ists whose personal involvement with their political ideology is
very intense. In a crisis situation, they consolidate their gains.
History, they feel, is on their side. And, sociologically, they are
better equipped to act as the agents of a historical destiny. They
are younger and better-educated; they take a broader view of
Iran’s role in the world arena. Perhaps more important, they are
more active among their fellows— giving and seeking advice, dis-
cussing the news. The pro-Russians, in short, have gained a superior
position astride the Iranian communication networks, and this is
likely to influence the future shape of Iranian society. Consider
the facts.

The Bipolarization of Media Behavior: Each respondent was
asked a set of questions about his radio-listening habits: (I) Did
he listen at all? (2) How often? (3) By plan or at random? The
answers are distributed in Table 16.

Table 16 — Radio-Listening by Bipolarity 22

Pro-Russians

PrO'Americans

Neutrals

Radio listeners

93%

78%

56%

Daily listeners

87

79

29

Planned listeners

55

45

39

More pro-Russians listen at all; of the listeners more pro-Russians
listen daily and more plan their listening.

What do they listen to? An important index is source: where
messages come from, in the bipolar world, often determines their
contents. Knowledge of international broadcasting indicates ideo-
logical sophistication— i.e., awareness of the interplay of interests
and ideologies in the world arena. The pro-Russians are way ahead
in ability to identify international broadcasts that can be heard
in Iran as shown in Table 17.

Many more pro-Russians know every major foreign station and
all the minor stations grouped under “Other.” Not only do more

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 383 )

of them know Radio Moscow— but also BBC and VOA, broadcasts
from India (voice of Asian Neutralism), from Pakistan (ally of
MEDO), from Cairo (adversary of MEDO). Sophistication is not
confined to a few pro-Russians but is spread uniformly among
them. Whereas over half of the Neutrals and a fourth of the pro-
Americans could identify no foreign stations, only one of 25 pro-
Russians was so uninformed.

Table 17 — Awareness of International Broadcasts

PrO’Russtans

Pro-AmtrJeant

N tut rah

Junto

96%

55%

43%

England

88

61

40

Indio

84

71

40

Pakistan

76

46

35

United States

68

55

38

Arab Countries

24

15

11

France

16

7

5

Olher

60

32

21

Don't know

4

25

54

Average per Respondent

5.1

3.4

2.3

Hie pro-Russians match

their extensive

information

with in-

tensive partisanship. Asked which was their favorite foreign station,
83J named Radio Moscow and a few named India— that was all.
By contrast, 71 % of the low-intensity pro-Americans named India,
while BBC and VOA were poor “also rans” for most of them. The
non-differentiating Neutrals mainly preferred India of course; while
a few' liked BBC and VOA, rather more liked Radio Moscow.

While the others listen apolitically and rather aimlessly, the
pro-Russians put their superior knowledge of international broad-
casting to the service of their political bias. As in air warfare a
priority mission is to knock out the enemy’s means of reprisal, so
the pro-Russians have concentrated on “poisoning” rival sources
of information in the war of the airwaves. Says one: “The domestic
radio is for a small portion of the people, but Moscow radio is for
everybody” (184). Says another: “England broadcasts for pro-
paganda but the Russians want to acquaint Iranians with the
world situation.” (180) Still another says: “The United States
broadcasts for propaganda purposes. But the Russians,” he adds
with the privileged logic of the propagandist, “ only for changing
the people's ideas ” (187) As with radio-listening. Table 18 shows,
so with newspaper reading. More pro-Russians read the newspapers
at all. Among those who do, more read their paper daily and they

( 384 )

On the Margins

Table 18 — Newspaper Reading by

Bipolarity

Pro-Russians

Pro-Americans

Neutrals

Reads newspaper af all

89%

78%

49%

Reads a paper daily

76

51

40

Reads three or more papers

78

48

44

read more papers. None reads only one paper and few read only
two papers, whereas most of the others are content with one or
two papers. The pro-Russians also read more types of news; they
show more interest in all parts of the newspaper and particularly
political items (editorials, national and foreign news) as in
Table 19.

Table 19 — Preferred Parts of Newspaper

Most interested in-

Pro-Rusxians

Pro-Americans

Neutrals

Foreign news

88%

73%

64%

Domestic news

88

84

85

Local news

12

10

9

Editorials

40

17

18

Culture

32

19

12

Other

56

51

45

Average per respondent

3.3

2.6

2.3

The centripetal tendency of media behavior that we have ob-
served throughout the Middle East is visible also in Iran. As the
pro-Russians lead in radio -listening and newspaper-reading, so
Table 20 shows that they lead in movie-going.

Table 20 — Movie Attendance by Bipolarity

Prefer Ptlms from:

Pro-Russians

Pro-Americans

Neutrals

America

35%

57%

58%

Russia

43

19

19

Britain

4

19

19

Don't know

4

19

19

This distribution is noteworthy. A practically universal result ob-
tained by polling, in most of the movie-going world, is the sub-
stantial preference for American films. Even the Neutrals in the
Iranian sample, whose other media preferences were as dispersed
as their political ideas, give American films a solid majority vote.
So, too, the hardly less diffuse pro-Americans. The preference for
Soviet films expressed by the pro-Russians is a rare case. The

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 385 )

political bias of this choice is obvious, but its full meaning is better
understood in the context of general attitudes toward the movies.

The pro-Americans go to the movies "to relax” (001) "to relax
mentally,” (056) "for pleasure,” (Oil) “for pleasure and relaxa-
tion." (019) Tin's shows in the sorts of films they prefer: ‘love and
dance movies” (015); "comedies, historical and technicolor movies”
(019); "musical pictures with an interesting story” (024); ‘love,
fighting and detective movies.” (056) Aesthetic and technical cate-
gories prevail among the reasons given for preferring American
films: "the staging and acting,” (019) "clarity of lighting” (021)
"diversity of films and beautiful actresses,” (024) "skillful actors,”
(067) "the technicolor.” (075) An unusually large number men-
tion “the beautiful sceneries”— since, for inhabitants of the severe
Iranian plateau, the sight of rolling country and greenery is a
feast for the eyes. These clearly apolitical tastes sometimes become
vigorously antipolitical. One pro-American moviegoer, who pre-
fers "love and detective stories and sometimes sports,” exploded:
“I hate die political pictures. It is better to let the movies free
from politics." (021)

The context of movie-going is rather different among die pro-
Russians. They go for “the real meaning of life,” (096) “moral
purposes,” (100) “educational purposes,” (184) “scientific and
ethical advantages.” (188) Those who go for pleasure do not “let
themselves go” completely without a higher purpose: “to pass time
and leam things,” (144) “for pleasure and to get ffieir moral
points," (193) "to enjoy music and leam something.” (068) They
prefer Russian movies, not for trivia of technique and aesthetic,
but for reasons consonant with these high purposes. They have
"more cdiics than in any other country’s productions” (188); diey
are "more realistic and more moralistic.” There is littie talk of
beautiful sceneries” here. The nuance is rather from the ethical
to die ideological: “I go to the movies because they are the most
powerful instruments to influence one’s ideas.” (1 48) Good ideas
should be shared and good ideologies propagated, hence Russian
movies are best because they “teach lessons to the masses of
people. (196) What do they teach? They “illustrate human strug-
gle for peace and demonstrate equality for all mankind.” (096)
No apolitical nonsense here; art and life march forward together.
A pro-Russian speaks of his recent favorites:

( 386 ) On the Margins

The Real Man was a masterpiece of perseverance, chivalry, sell-
sacrifice and all other good qualities which a real man should possess.
In The War of Stalingrad, it was shown how the heroes of the Soviet
Union cut the egoistic hands of Hitlerists. The result is this: that a
nation with a strong theory and a doctrine of “the people” (everything
for the people) shall never die. In that movie, we saw how Hitler was
driven back to non-existence from behind the gates of Moscow. (147)

Style and Stakes: Feelings about the media often exhibit very
profoundly a person s general view of life, for the world is repre-
sented to him by the media— with the greatest naturalism and
impact by the movies. His responses often express tire interplay
of reality and revery in his personal style. More than political
partisanship, as we understand it in the pluralist West, is impli-
cated in die divergent media tastes just reviewed.

There are important personality differences between those who
regularly shun political in favor of “lighter” films (which they
admire for aesthetic reasons) and others who regularly prefer
“serious” films heavily freighted with useful lessons of morality
and ideology. The ones are using the media as sublimational chan-
nels for vicarious experience of the lives of others. This is what
Aristotie called the cathartic function of art— a highly civilized be-
havioral sequence. The others, meanwhile, are using the media as
a preparative rather than purgative— a more pragmatic behavioral
sequence akin to the war paint and dances by which certain tribes
prepare warriors for battle. These different modes of handling
aesthetic experience produce different results. The sublimational
mode leads to contented quietism; die inspirational mode elicits
agitational activism.

When these divergent modes are regularly found among two
distinct groups of people, then we are dealing with a psychic gap
of social consequence. Among groups which exhibit uniform so-
ciological characteristics, they spell class cleavage. When this is
die most advanced class, such a split elite tends to render the whole
body politic schismatic. Wrapped in contrary ideologies and po-
litical organizations, the schismatic groups become competing
counter-elites. When affiliated to the rival poles of a bipolar world
arena, these competing elites tend to bipolarize the structure of
internal politics as well. The strategic model of the two-player,
zero-sum game supplies the rules— no shifting coalitions, no mixed
strategies, and winner take all! Postwar Iran has moved in tin’s

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 3S7 )

sequence. Two extremist groups, splitting away from their elite
origins, have armed themselves with contrary ideologies that in-
stigate divergent behavioral styles leading to incompatible life-
ways. Incorporating these ideologies into conflicting political move-
ments, they have associated themselves with the rivalrous Ameri-
can and Russian poles of the bipolar world. Thereby they began to
reshape Iran internally in the bipolar mold. But the internal bi-
polarization will not be completed until one of tire players acquires
tile trump card— the Iranian mass.

The politically-relevant segment of the masses is the big stake
in the current phase of the game. Once it is clearly won by either
side, the final coalitions will be fixed and the winner wall take all.
At the moment, the Moderates control the mass after surviving
two major postwar crises over Azerbaijan and AIOC. Each of these
was accompanied by a series of domestic crises— mass demonstra-
tions in the streets, arrests and assassinations, interruption of parlia-
mentary' governance, flight of the Shah, overthrowing of govern-
ments. Recurrent crisis is a sign of sickness in any society; frequent
and protracted crisis can be fatal. The Iranian elite survived its
postwar crises at a heavy cost, including alienation of potential
recruits into both extremes of the political continuum. These coun-
ter-elites made important gains by effective manipulation of the
personal insecurities which breed and multiply during public crises
—manipulation accomplished through their influential positions in
the national communication network.

Leftist success, in this phase of the struggle for mass support,
is due to several factors:

(1) They are sociologically better equipped for effective mass
communication— i.e., they are better educated, better informed,
younger, and more active among those segments of the Iranian pop-
ulation that are ready to be politicized.

(2) They are psychologically better equipped to incorporate
propaganda successes in the recruitment and organization of a
counter-elite— i.e., whereas the Rightist ideology obliges people to
judge issues one at a time, the Leftist ideology is a comprehensive
way of life embodied in a Movement Also, Leftist directives,
cumulating in a “line” consistent with its own organizational growth,
arc administered by Extremists. The Rightists are restricted by the
preponderance of Moderates on their side.

( 388 ) On the Margins

(3) They are politically better equipped to exploit tire limited
margins of action permitted by the world bipolarity-i.e., whereas
ambivalence toward the West (Anglophobia plus apolitical pro-
Americanism) among moderate Rightists weakens the bonds with
their “natural pole” in the bipolar world and makes their public
policy oscillate from one crisis to another. Leftist leadership, more
homogeneous with respect to the Soviet center, maintains clear
and consistent lines of communication between local operations
and world communism in critical situations.

Under these conditions, new political energies tend to flow
Leftward. The comprehensive ideology provides clear and simple
solutions that attract restless souls; the monolithic organization
channels their activity into a common program. Given the moderate
character of the Rightist posture, extremist temperaments of
variant persuasion find more outlets for vigorous action (oratory,
assassination, mass demonstration, mob violence) on the Left.

The oil crisis was a case. While Right Extremists grew impatient
with the moderate measures and compromise solutions sought by
the governing group, the vigorous young propagandists on the
Left were making their own nationalistic symbols resound and
organizing the populace around themselves. The techniques of
shuluq (commotion) and tamasha (show) were clearly paying off
on the Left. Some Right extremists, unable to restrain themselves,
carried their colors into the rival camp and there made what
seemed to be a common cause.

This ad hoc “united front” was finally routed (with a little
Rightist shuluq led by Shaaban the Brainless) but the Left reg-
istered a significant gain. Not all the Rightists who had coalesced
with the Left remained in the Leftist camp— but a substantial
number doubtless did. More important, their defections deprived
the Right of its own most vigorous and action-oriented elements.
Rightist attrition while the Left consolidated meant that, in the
next crisis, the extremist Left would be relatively and absolutely
stronger. The symbol of this process was Dr. Mohammed Mossa-
degh.

5. The Meaning of Mossadegh

The political posture of Mossadegh derived from a combination
of elements which, account taken of differences in their oersonal and

Iran: In a Bipolar World

( 389 )

national situations, we have described earher as the Nasser Syn-
drome." This difficult posture seeks to nde tand ® m ° n
K rwt currents of radical change surging through the Middle East
-national independence and social democracy. The balance is
delicate because the rider cannot control the velocity of the winds
nor the height of the waves, but can only seek a steady course
between these ungoverned elements. Mossadegh rode high to a
fall; Nasser may do the same. Other riders will try the course after
them. Each such player breaks the rules of the world political
game by, more or less deliberately, overbidding his hand. This
introduces a special type of chaos into die game.

Who was tin's aged Iranian that, for two long years, focused
world attention upon his every word and deed? There is no mystery
about the personality, for he gave ample public evidence of the
self-dramatizing flair which identifies the propagandist-agitator
type. 23 The fainting and weeping spells of “Mossy” were known
throughout the newspaper-readirig world, which was also permitted
to share his active life in pajamas— his flight into hiding (before
global cameras) from alleged assassins, his protest strikes against
wicked adversaries at home and abroad. The vanity associated with
such exhibitionism was manifested by Mossadeghs celebration of
his 69th birthday over five successive years; retirement from the
Majlis being mandatory at 70 gave these demonstrations a simul-
taneous practical aspect. 24

Mossadegh was prepared for his climactic years by the entire
course of his career. Bom 1881 into the highest level of Iranian
society, the world was his oyster. His father was a Minister of the
Court, his maternal uncle a prince. After taking his diploma at the
Ecole des Sciences Polibques in Paris, he was engaged at about
age 17 m the Ministry of Finance, where he remained ten years
in good elite fashion, he then returned to Europe for advanced
studies, first at the University of Liege in Belgium, then at the

cfjrtnLt eU f 4td in S ' vil2erIand Equipped with a Doctorate

c inE ' 77?*° 8 brffliant politicaI ««» at home,

Ciimbmg rapidly up the ladder of power:

m»1o!o Committc “ Third Majlis

918-1919: Deputy Finance Minister, then Chief of General

faTS) ePartInent - then Mlnister of Justice

( 390 ) On the Margins

1920: Governor-General, Province of Fars

1921 : Minister of Finance ( first year of Reza Shah regime)

1922: Governor-General, Province of Azerbaijan

1923: Minister of Foreign Affairs

From this height, at 42 head of Reza Shahs foreign ministry, Dr.
Mossadegh suddenly toppled. During 1924-28, as a simple member
of the Majlis, he opposed the chief of state at every turn. According
to one observer: “Dr. Mossadegh never supported anyone in the
Majlis except himself and he never ceased to inveigh against
foreign influence.” 25 By 1928, Reza Shah had had enough. Mossa-
degh was imprisoned and finally banished from the capital to
pastoral exile in Ahmadabad. 20

The details of his fall from grace are obscure, for Iranian states-
men publish no memoirs. 27 But one root of the conBict was Mossa-
degh’s oppositionism to the Shah’s intemationalizing-modemizing
policies. Like many a young man before and since him, Mossadegh
had returned from his European studies to a sense of shame about
the dismal state of his homeland. (Recall the prominence of “shame”
in the memoirs of both Naguib and Nasser.) His first book re-
formulated Muslim law according to the Shiite sect, using his
advanced training in Western law for comparative purposes. Com-
parisons between Western and Iranian ways preoccupied much
of his life; comparative studies of constitutional law, financial
legislation, principles of finance came from his pen. He confronted
the problem directly in Iran and Capitulations, and by a curious
skirting maneuver in The Principle of Non-Extradition for Political
Crimes.

Nationalism took on a xenophobic character when Mossadegh,
throwing his fantasies in the face of facts, declared that Iran needed
no financial assistance from abroad. He opposed American aid in
any form and attacked, -with equal bitterness, the Irano-Soviet
commercial treaty. Mossadegh, some said, was one of the rare
Iranians who had never asked a foreigner for a favor. This private
and public style was destined for popularity. When Reza Shah
was forced into exile, Mossadegh— remembered as the man who
had dared to say “no” to the Shah— promptly resumed his political
career. Elected deputy from Tehran in 1944, he soon sponsored a
measure prohibiting further oil concessions to foil Russian designs
against the subsoil of northern Iran. Six years later, he began his

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 391 )

campaign against AIOC by drafting the nationalization law winch
precipitated the great oil crisis. Tins shook the world and split the
Iranian ruling class that had nurtured him.

Dr. Mossadeghs deviation from the elite was primarily tem-
peramental, not ideological. Rather Rightist than Leftist in his
doctrines, he deviated by excessive zeal in seeking to activate these
beliefs. The moderate ruling group sought to further the national
interest by playing carefully with both poles of the world arena.
The extremist Mossadegh would play with neither. Instead he
aimed at driving them both from the native soil, though geo-
political destiny made this an all-but-impossible mission. Rebuffed
by the practical men of his class, who gave higher priority to the
effectiveness of their means than the sanctity of their ends, the
agitational Dr. Mossadegh turned elsewhere for support. And with
him, Iranian society took a turn.

For Dr. Mossadegh s illicit relationship with the left restored
the banned Ttidch Party to a position of public prominence, while
splitting his own Rightist constituency at a vital point (by alienat-
ing the solid Moderates). This was a dangerous game in which,
given the circumstances. Dr. Mossadegh could hardly win and the
Leftists (whom he thought to use) could hardly lose. The ironic
outcome was that this outraged product of the West nearly ceded
Iran to the East, this extreme Nationalist made common cause that
served the Communists. Never, according to informed consensus,
was Iran pushed so close to the Iron Curtain.

The Mossadegh movement was stopped, but others will come
to by again the hazardous course he designed. For the meaning
of Mossadegh lies in the style of his politics. His daring effort to
slip between the horns of bipolar dilemmas is bound to attract
new impatient, extremist young men whose aspirations must find
outlets in action. Mossadegh failed as a politician because his
calculus of power was faulty— in a bipolar world one does not
maximize gains by shouting “a plague on both your houses.” Hence
his place in history is likely to be small, for conventional history
is not written in terms of political failure. But in any history of
t ie mass media as an agency of social change in Iran, his place
must be large. For Dr. Mossadegh, the political failure, was a
magnificent success as a propagandist He spoke with the weight
0 e ancient learned and mighty to the hearts of the newly

{ 392 ) On the Margins

aspiring. Hear the testimony of a minor government employee
about the radio: “If there is Dr. Mossadegh . . . everybody will
remain silent and listen. But there is no attention for others’
speeches.” (134)

What Mossadegh did was to bring the mass media and their
audiences into the arena of political conflict. Once there, they are
a potential reserve of political activism which no future spokesman
of extremist temperament is likely to overlook. The significance
of this transformation in Iranian society— the initiation of the
politically-relevant mass into the bipolar game— was lost upon most
reporters, caught up in the daily flow of events, but noted by one
astute editorialist of The New York Times. Wrote Clifton Daniel,
in an article headlined “Mossadegh Career Unique in Iran”:

Dr. Mossadegh was one of the first to discover that, after generations
of illiteracy and political inertia, something like an informed public
opinion is beginning to emerge in Iran, and he has made great use of
it. It has been his custom, whenever he has any obstacle to surmount
or new policy to propose, to speak to the people by radio and ask
for their support. 28

Small wonder that the first target in the coup tfStat whereby
General Zahedi overthrew Mossadegh, was Radio Tehran. “Without
a microphone,” said a learned Iranian observer, “Mossadegh was
impotent.” How, one may ask, in a land so inadequately equipped
with mass media or mass audience, had Mossadegh applied so
effectively the modern technique of governance through public
opinion? What had changed in Iran by reason of the Mossadegh
style?

6. Epilogue: The Future of Media and Mass

In the spring of 1954, four years after the original survey, I
returned to Iran with these questions in mind: What heritage of
the Mossadegh method was still visible? How were his successors
coping with this heritage? I interviewed leading Iranians at the
Court, the Ministries, the Majlis; also key Americans— the Am-
bassador, the head of Point Four, the chief of military mission, and
specialists on their staffs. On the Mossadegh heritage these men,
who had watched his operations from strategic observatories, were
substantially agreed. On what to do about it, there was less clarity
and less unanimity. I visited the modern media— radio stations,

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 393 )

newspaper offices, cinemas. Also bazaars and teahouses-where
messages are relayed into the mainstream of oral communication
_ in middle-sized towns and ancient villages. In a land where
systematic social research is non-existent and statistics are treach-
erous, one sees what one can. I gained the impression that Iran
today is balancing between two perspectives of governance. These
were expressed in interviews with two responsible directors of
Press and Propaganda-one before, die other after, Mossadegh.

General Farzanagan: “The People Need a Normal Quiet Life
"What Mossadegh neglected to tell the people is that the world is
larger than the city of Tehran. He encouraged people to believe
they could decide issues diat are beyond their real competence.”
So spoke General Farzanagan, director of Propaganda and Gov-
ernment Spokesman under Mossadegh’s successor, General Zahedi.
Intense, soft-spoken, obviously intelligent, Farzanagan is a modem
type of military man. He received a complete civil education in
the U. S.— from private schools through Harvard— and his two sons
are now following die same course. No militarist or mandarin,
Farzanagan prescribed social justice to cure social unrest. The
Mossadegh technique, he said, was spurious: instead of solutions
he offered excitement. To unleash popular hatred of foreigners
does not improve the well-being of Iranians and, deep down, people
are aware of this. But the crowd enjoyed watching an Iranian
leader who, instead of “negotiating endlessly” with foreigners, just
"slapped them down.”

“The Communists learned from Mossadegh, after having taught
him, how to use these techniques of falsification, how to build true
stones into a false mosaic. They raise constantly die same question:
Is there social justice? Do people earn a fair living? Every one of
us knows that the answer is ‘No,’ just as all of us know that the
little peasant (zaim) really has no chance in the courts against
his village-owner ( malik ). Over and over they ask: Is there not cor-
ruption in government? All of us know the answer to each question
is jes. But do the questions go together? The falsity lies in string-
ing together true statements in a spurious syllogism, which leads

o t e false conclusion that Communism is the only and inevitable
way out

,, Th °f techniques have worked because there is a vacuum in
mm s o t e people, into which our enemy can pour what he

( 394 ) On the Margins

wishes to be believed. The Tudeh preaches equality; Mossadegh
preached nationalism. Both are fine ideals. What is false is that
neither has any practice for his preachments. Meanwhile, by inciting
people through hatred, they prepare them only for destruction and
not construction. Under Mossadegh ‘the sense of discipline was
broken and irresponsible license was allowed to rule/ Of course
our definition of ‘the people’ has to be different in this country:
17 of our 18 million people have not been involved in these excite-
ments.”

The mischief has been done among the other million, which
is composed of three main groups. First, the intellectuals:

In the poisoned atmosphere of our universities, people who should
know better accept the Communist propaganda because it soothes some
of their pains. This is to be expected when there are so few appropriate
jobs for so many teachers, students, aspirants, and when those with jobs
get such miserable wages. What would people in your university [M.I.T.]
think of paying engineers $35 a month?

Second, the opportunists. “Their loyalties are for hire and they find
ways to benefit from any disturbance. They helped Mossadegh and
the Tudeh to create mass hysteria, which is not the same as an
informed public opinion. The third and largest group were ex-
ploited by the first two— e.g., shopkeepers and artisans, unhappy
with the way things are, and ready to believe what they are told
and repeat it to others.” These people have now recovered from
the Mossadegh mischief. “The shopkeeper now tends his shop
instead of spending his time orating in public.”

The other 17 million are “nice, decent, kindly people who have
been fooled too long by too many promises.” The Mossadegh style
of creating public clamor can be contained. What they need is
deeds not words. “The people now must be shown, not simply
told, the virtues of a normal quiet life.”

“How are we going about this? Well, there is a National Orien-
tation Committee whose mission is to tame people and to give
them hope. Depolitizing the media is one technique: we now
have a radio station broadcasting only music from 11 a.m. to
11 p.m. (an idea pretty popular in the States and very appre-
ciated here). At the same time, we just signed a contract with
the Varga firm in Sweden for delivery of radios, starting with 2,000
and gradually increasing to 5,000 per month, at one-third of their
current price in Iran.”

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 395 )

Wc left General Farzanagan wondering whether he could suc-
ceed in welding his two objectives— “to tame people” and “to give
them hope"— into a single policy.

Professor Issa Sadiq: “ Literacy Can Be Dangerous.’' Professor
Sadiq, now a member of the Senate, as Minister of Education un-
der Reza Shall had created a department of Press and Propaganda
in 1940-41. A thoughtful elder statesman, whose book Modern
Persia and Her Educational System was published a quarter-
century ago, he had long pondered the traditional structure of his
society and its capacity' for change. His evident interest in tech-
nical details, media relays, political relevance was located in a
large context. The Iranian plateau, he pointed out, was an ex-
cellent receiving area for short-wave signals. The Russians used
this condition to beam three powerful transmitters— from Moscow,
Baku, and a secret place in South Caucasus— that are heard better
in much of Iran than Radio Tehran. These are fully effective in
jamming VOA and, somewhat less, BBC. Radio-listening, he con-
tinued, serves various purposes. Whereas Customs inspection esti-
mated 350,000 receivers in Iran, Sadiqs independent estimate was
closer to 500,000. Said he:

Radios come in through other channels than Customs and often less
as tax-evasion than as a military secret. I have never heard of a tribal
chieftain without a radio. This is his surest means of always knowing
the whereabouts of the Shah and the Chief of Staff, which at times is
for him an important item of military intelb'gence.

His estimate of Mossadegh was qualified— an “expert publi-
cist,” certainly not a “great strategist” It seems difficult for Iran-
ians to perceive, said Sadiq, that radio is not a national policy
but one among several instruments of policy. The Zahedi govern-
ment, being military men, are even less than Mossadegh used to
thinking of “words and deeds as an ensemble.” Mossadegh over-
valued words; soldiers overvalue deeds. But since they are in-
evitably associated in daily life, “the political art consists in mak-
ing them go together in the direction one has chosen.”

Take the problem of illiteracy', said Sadiq. Teaclung people
to read and write is surely an admirable goal. But without a com-
prehensive social policy, literacy can be dangerous. My village
{which Sadiq owns) became largely literate as the result of a

( 396 ) On the Margins

school I created there years ago. But I left it at that. Result: Over
1,600 pamphlets in Persian, but printed in Russia, have been dis-
tributed by the Tudeh in my village. They have attacked every
government in its turn, twisted the thinking of people without
other sources of information, recruited supporters. How can they
know that what is described to them as a great Peoples’ Democracy
is rather the blackest tyranny? How, having so little to lose them-
selves, shall they resist the idea that they could only gain by mak-
ing others lose all? He who reads must run. “Without relation to
earning a living, understanding the life of their society, and being
prepared for citizenship, you see, literacy can be dangerous!”

Postscript: Returning from Iran by way of London, in May
1954, I consulted the files of letters from Iranian listeners in the
BBC archives. One dated September 16, 1953, from a small town
on the Persian Gulf, asked:

Why is it that all the great capitah'st countries, including Britain
and the USA, are so afraid of the Tudeh Party and try to stop its
growth with the most modern weapons? Is this party harmful to society?

This is a faithful Communist representation of the world, on the
simple level of popular communication, and one may doubt that
this writer is quite as naive as his questions are designed to sug-
gest. But in scattered places around the vast Iranian area, people
are asking similar questions, rhetorical in some measure, in these
“loaded” formulae. And such spurious questions lead, as General
Farzanagan pointed out, to a false choice.

For, in the curiously ahistorical process of social change now
operating throughout the Middle East, psychic “participation”
through opinion is spreading before genuine political and economic
participation. People acquire a voice and even a vote before they
acquire a “stake.” They are stimulated to have opinions before
achieving the lifeways historically regarded as requisite for people
with opinions. This problem of timing underlies General Farzana-
gan’s concern with the Communist techniques of deception and
Professor Sadiq’s caution that “literacy can be dangerous.” Both are
men of liberal stamp, but both confront a society still reeling from
the impact of forces let loose by Dr. Mossadegh. Farzanagan wants
social justice evolved within a “normal quiet life”; he wants “to tame
people” while giving them hope. Sadiq, too, wants rising literacy but

Iran: In a Bipolar World ( 397 j

he has become wary of imbalanced social change-of spreading

opinions without providing the context in which public opinion works
efficiently.

The mark of Mossadegh is upon such men in Iran, as every-
where in the Middle East. How to develop a participant public
widiout unleashing an unruly mob? Nasser has raised this problem
in Egypt as have the extremist leaders in Syria and Jordan. A young
Iranian professional man put it cogently: "There is no such thing
as public opinion m Iran, there is only public emotion .’- 0 But

XaSnge ^ bM " CerHfirf “ “ «8»cy

XI.

Retrospect and Prospect

WE HAVE traversed a long and varied route through
many lands, many lives. The personal meaning of moderniza-
tion in the Middle East cannot, we have seen, be reduced to a
simple formula. Yet, there are important regularities. To stress
these where we End them does not “dehumanize” the persons to
whom they apply. It does not lessen the dignity of an individual’s
dilemmas, his hurts and exhilirations, to note that these are shared
by many other individuals caught up in the modernizing process.
To see the common human situation of diverse people, localizing
in their own time and place a process that is global in scope, can
be humanizing in the measure that enlightenment leads to better-
ment The perception of regularities may, in this sense, be the
main gift of social research to social policy.

We have not “proved” our theory of modernization; we have
only explained and exemplified the regularities it posits. These
regularities are now, by scientific canons, only more plausible
hypotheses than they were before. But those who must deal with
the issues of modernization in the world today may, in the ab-
sence of rigorous proofs, find these propositions more useful than
speculations which have not been disciplined by data.

A starting point, for this retrospective glance, is the remark-
able finding on unhappiness (chapter III, table 10). Whatever
merit the conventional dichotomy of urban anomie versus rural
stability may have possessed once upon a time somewhere, in the
Middle East today people talk as if they never heard such non-
sense. In every country, the rural villagers declare themselves the
most unhappy fellows. In every country, the modernizing indi-

( 398 )

Retrospect and Prospect ( 399 )

viduals are considerably less unhappy-and die more rapidly the
society around them is modernized the happier they are. Only
where the mobile individuals have overrun the capacity of exist-
ing social institutions, as in Egypt and Syria, are they about as
unhappy as their village brethren. Traditional society is passing
from the Middle East because relatively few Middle Easterners
still want to live by its rules.

As the traditional rules crumble, some of the basic relationships
among human beings undergo transformation. The ancient power
of the village elders declines to respectful deference while real in-
fluence goes elsewhere. The Traditional rule that age brings wisdom
probably worked well in immobile isolate villages, where change
was slow and experience was the only teacher. The longer one
lived, the more experience he gained and the greater his title to wis-
dom. Now the young men no longer await their patrimony. They
go off to the cities, take jobs under the modem discipline, learn
from newspapers and movies. On many matters they are better
informed-perhaps "wiser,” perhaps not— than the old timers. As
these are the matters of current interest, others (including their
elders) turn to the young men for opinions and advice. The struc-
ture of influence thus changes in the community and in the family.

As the patriarchal family loses command, other ancient be-
liavioral routines are opened to question. The Traditional rule that
woman is inferior by nature, for example, worked well so long as
she was given no opportunities for trying alternatives to her assigned
sex- and work-roles. But as the men move out of the lifeways of
rural subsistence agriculture, the women are no longer counted as
essential units of the family's total labor force. The housewife
often remains a conservative influence, hut the daughter takes
advantage of her new opportunities for a. little education, a little
adventure, a little excitement. As the boy is no longer his father’s
shadow, the girl is no longer her mother’s replica. Thus mobility
liberates the newer generations, of both sexes, and the foundations
of Traditional society are undermined.

The male vanity culture which underlay Traditional institutions
has proved relatively defenseless against the inroads of the mass
media, particularly the movies. Among the more Traditional ele-
ments, such as the Beduin of the Jordan desert, the males still
put up a stiff defense. Said one Transjordanian: “Movies spoil
men. . . . Those who go get a very bad character and are no

( 400 ) Retrospect and Prospect

more men.” But they have not yet been brought under steady
attack. Where the impact of movies has been massive and sus-
tained, as in modem Lebanon, the results are highly visible. Says
Hourani: “The process of change is being speeded by one mani-
festation of Western civilization above all: the film which expresses
a conception of the relations between man and woman which are
far from those prevalent in the Islamic world.”

The younger people acknowledge the impact of the media, but
in quite another tone of voice. The “progressive” young Syrian
bureaucrat echoed dozens of respondents in all countries: “When
we see the lives of people in the West, and then compare it with
our own lives, we find that we still have a long way to go before
attaining their levels. The movies are . . . like a teacher to us,
who tells us what to do and what not.”

What do the movies teach? Where does the “long way to go”
lead? Here is the nub of the process by which personality is being
reshaped in the Middle East. The media teach new desires and
new satisfactions. They depict situations in which the “good things”
of life— of which most Middle Easterners never dreamed before-
are taken for granted. They portray roles in which these richer
lives are lived, and provide clues as to how these roles can be
enacted by others.

Even a little such fantasy, in the Middle East, goes a long way.
For the mechanism of empathy is thereby engaged. Operating at
tire level of a person’s identity, empathy alters the basic self-
imagery by which a person defines what he is and what he may
become. To alter this self-imagery requires comprehensive re-
arrangements of the self-system, that system which locates all
elements of a person’s environment in their proper place. The
young ex-villager, when he has learned to read and earn his living
in die city, sees his family, community, religion, class, nation in
different relationship to himself than he used to do. His new view
certainly differs from what his father’s used to be. A whole new
style of life is involved.

The Balgat Grocer’s specific ambition was modest; he wanted
to own a larger grocery store in nearby Ankara. But this so
transformed his array of self-images— his necktie, his desire for
“nice civilian clothes,” his “eye at the higher places”— as to cleave
him from his fellow villagers. “I am not like the others here. They

Retrospect and Project ( 401 )

don't know any better," said the Grocer. He is an "infidel, ungrate-
ful for what Allah has given,” responded the Balgati.

The Grocers empathy went unrewarded as, in his own judg-
ment, it was destined to do: "I have not the possibility in myself
to get the things I want. They only bother me.” This was the
resignation of an older man, aware that the limits imposed by
reality include one’s own capacities. Among younger Transitionals
new desires, once stirred, are not so stoically quieted. The younger
man is more likely to develop the capacity within himself to
achieve his desires and then demand opportunities from his en-
vironment. Where the increase of desirous individuals and the
growth of opportunities are in balance, there the psychosocial
conditions for stable growth are good. Where personal desires
greatly exceed institutional capacities, there the prospects are for
instability of a sort which impedes rational and cumulative mod-
ernization.

Our analysis of statistical data on 73 countries around the
world confirmed this view of modernization as a “systemic” process.
The demographic, economic, political, communication and cultural
"sectors" of a modernizing society grow together, and this joint
growth occurs in regular phases. One can even fix “critical ratios”
between the sectors that indicate the limits within which balanced
growth is likely to occur in each phase. Chapter II presented the
case for the global validity of these views. Chapter III showed their
applicability to the different levels of modernization achieved by
the six Middle East countries we have surveyed.

In the case studies, we differentiated the countries where a
balanced process of modernization is under way (Turkey and
Lebanon); those where social change is seriously out of phase
(Egypt and Syria); those where, for different reasons, a modern-
izing process was barely visible at the time of the 1950-1951 sur-
vey (Jordan and Iran).

These studies highlighted the radical role assigned to politics
in countries where modernization is out of phase. A result of
unplwsed growth, in our terms, is the "over-production” of Transi-
tionals along the continuum of psychocultural modernization. These
individuals are equipped with new desires and new skills; but their
demographic and economic institutions are less well equipped to
provide opportunities and satisfactions. This imbalance is a basic

( 402 ) Retrospect and Prospect

problem which some Middle East countries, lacking more appro-
priate resources, are trying to solve by political means.

The growing class of Transitionals throughout the Middle East
focuses its problems and shapes its prospects. Having acquired a
taste for a better style of life, they now seek ways to achieve it.
But the traditional settings in which they live have been routinized,
even rigidified, by centuries of past practice. The newly-mobile
men and women, liberated by their imagination of better things
from reverence toward what is, become frustrated and depressed,
or antagonistic and aggressive, when their social institutions pro-
vide inadequate opportunities for mobility. They move toward
the extremes of political action, attracted toward the instruments
of propaganda, agitation and violence, by which they hope to dis-
rupt the settled order and to speed their way toward a more satis-
fying way of life. Their image of a more satisfactory society, usu-
ally vague and diffuse, is provided by the mass media—originally
from the West and now increasingly from indigenous sources. In
the developing attitudes of these Transitionals, and in the growth
of mass media as a shaping influence, is contained a key to the
Middle Eastern future. What are the problems and prospects?

There is, first of all, the political problem of governance: who
shall govern, and in the name of what? The quest for a usable
identity is a major theme of current political activity throughout
the area. Political leadership everywhere justifies itself in the
name of the “public good”; but how shall the “public good” be
defined in Middle Eastern politics? Shall leaders act in the name
of nations— Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iran? Shall they seek some larger
constituency— an “Arab nation” or an “Islamic unity”? The attrac-
tion of larger units for politicians operates in all times and places,
for in greater unity there is greater strength. But how to achieve
such unity? The sophisticates of Cairo will not yoke their tastes
and interests with the desert Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia simply
because they are both nominally Arab and Islamic peoples. Nor,
for the sake of a purely formal symbolism of unity, will King
Saud or his competitive younger brother compromise their income
from the West in order to pursue some grander aspirations for
those who lead Egypt. Throughout the area the claims of regional,
religious and racial unity are continuously compromised by the
demands of nationalism and the interests of ruling elites.

But those who rule today may not survive the deep-seated con-

Retrospect and Prospect ( 403 )

fil'ets of loyalty that rock the area. In many places, the traditional
elite is gone or is going. Competition is fierce for larger shares in
the new distribution of power. The Army and the bureaucracy,
flic landed gentry and tire new capitalists, the secular intelligentsia
and the urban proletariat-all these have staked out their claims.
Many of these new aspirants to power will make their way into
the new elites, whether by peaceful incorporation or violent sub-
version of the old elites. Before cohesion and direction can be
achieved, however, they will have to provide a convincing symbol-
ism of the “public good” around which a widespread consensus
can be formed. Private and public identities must come into a
stable relationship.

But the articulation of a stable identity is particularly difficult
for individuals in tire Middle East today, because the great current
drama of the area as a whole is precisely its quest for a suitable
collective identity. Consider the several plirases which have tongue-
tied recent efforts to speak, in a single name, of the lands which
read) from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent: Arab World,
Muslim World, Fertile Crescent, Arab League, Northern Tier.
Consider the veiy term “Middle East,” a Western invention which
has been taken up by native politicians. In their quest for a
usable identity, the politicians naturally respond with misleading
grace to such simplified nomenclature, which imputes to their area
a homogeneity that corresponds to no observable reality. Here, as
ever, it better suits politicians to speak in the name of a unity of
some sort— and rather a larger than a smaller unity. No harm is
done by tin's conventional manipulation of the symbols of identity,
so long as claims by the desirous are not mistaken as descriptions
by the innocent. No sober scholar would permit the homogeneity
imputed by die phrase to obscure the actual heterogeneity of its
object. Any accurate Middle East landscape will depict the politi-
cal ties that bind in pale pastels over a distant horizon; the bold
primary colors in the foreground will represent multiplicity and
diversity.

For the term Middle East” is devoid of affect, and even of
specific reference, among the general population of the area. The
terms in which leaders speak of a larger unity— if they speak at all
on such matters-are the Arab or Muslim symbols of identity. These
conceptions of the self are indigenous, but even the indigenous
symbols have only agitated the quest for a collective identity

( 404 ) Retrospect and Prospect

without resolving it. The attempt to establish the Arab-Muslim
syndrome as the symbolic base of a functioning polity is likely to
fail on empirical grounds.

There are in. the world approximately 350,000,000 Muslims, who
form a population belt stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, ex-
tending north into Siberia and south to Zanzibar. This belt wanders
through a galaxy of climes and times that have in common only
the slightest thread of history, outlook and aspiration. There are,
for example, more Muslims in the USSR than in any single country
of the Middle East. There are more Muslims in the Far East than
in all the Middle Eastern lands combined. Indeed there are more
Muslims in Indonesia alone than in all Arab countries together.
To speak of this enormous population spread over the earth’s sur-
face as a unified “Muslim world” is, on practically any issue of
current world politics, simply wishful.

Even within the Arab area proper, there is no recent tradition
of a politically-usable “unity of all Islam.” The historic cleavage
between Sunni and Shia Muslims corresponds roughly to the
partition of Christendom between Greek and Roman Catholic ver-
sions of the apostolic succession. The majority Sunni branch itself
contains an array of hostile sects whose impact is divisive upon
the concept of a “Muslim world.” From relatively small differences
over dogma (originally involving major differences of political juris-
diction) there developed among Sunni Muslims a psychic gap of
the same order as exists between fundamentalist Baptists and high-
church Episcopalians. This has been exacerbated by the accretion
of competing political and economic interests to the rival sects.
Iraq and Iran, where Shfites prevail, are joined with Turkey, where
Islam has been disestablished, in the Baghdad Pact. Jordan is
linked to Iraq by the Hashemite dynasty and to Cairo by its
Sunni majority; the split between these competing claims is inten-
sified by the irredentist voices of the Palestine refugees.

The Cold War has only sharpened differences which seemed
to matter less before “Arab-Muslim unity” became a key symbol
of political effort. But these differences run deep and cannot simply
be cancelled by fiat of current ideologies. Thus, the prevailing
sect of Saudi Arabia is the fundamentalist and revivalist Wahhabism
(although many Shia inhabit the al-Haba oases and most Dawasir
people are Malikis). Their conception of the Koran, as a practical
handbook of rules for daily life, is feasible for people who still

Retrospect and Prospect ( ^

, n j in deser t setting much like that to which Muhammad

cosmopolitan Cairo, Wahhabism and Zaidism often become the
obj«/of ideological recrimination or (perhaps more se nous)
mockery and ridicule. Hence, even those Muslim Arabs who yearn
for a common identity are often tom between the ritual pull of
Mecca and the political tug of Cairo. But many Arabs feel no such
yearning at all. In Egypt the Copts constitute a durable Christian
minority. In Lebanon and Syria a small but potent sect of Druzes
have, in the course of centuries, so far detached themselves that
they’ hardly qualify as Muslims (indeed their ritual service is
secret). Throughout the Arab area the Imami (Twelvers), by de-
claring their recognition of the first twelve Imams, separate them-
selves from the Ismailis (Seveners) who owe their special allegiance
to tlie Aga Khan of Pakistan. Finally, two states in the area do not
officially adhere to Islam at all-Lebanon, governed by an official
Christian majority,- and Israel, a Hebrew nation.

The pivotal roles in Middle Eastern communication filled by
these non-Muslim, minority Muslim, dissident Muslim and mar-
ginal groups was shown in the case studies. The historic develop-
ment of public communication has been largely the work of groups
excluded from, or marginal to, the majority Arab-Muslim syn-
drome. The foregoing indications of diversity suggest that a col-
lective identity symbolized by Pan-Islam may hardly be viable in
the living Middle East. Indeed, such sentimental sorties into the
symbolism of a majestic past have mainly obscured the conditions
of genuine area unity in the future, The key is modernization. The
top polity problem, for three generations of Middle Eastern lead-
ers, has been whether one must choose between “Mecca or mecha-
nization or whether one can make them compatible.

thnul/rT** f the ha$ been ' not whether > but how one
should move from traditional ways toward modern life-styles The

tymboh o race and ritual fade into irrelevance when they impede

evidence 'dPour

novertv l M,M ? Easteraers have themselves identified

wStrr “ ** W * — * ^ *>- of modern,^

fc eoTfiict now tuts ™ * DeW P T Paon o£ a desirable future^
now turns upon power. The question is who shall coni

( 406 ) Retrospect and Prospect

trol the direction and tempo of modernization and under what
banners? The elites have been riven internally by this, to them,
paramount political question. It is only Western indifference that
portrays the struggle between Nasser and Naguib in Egypt, the
rise and fall of Mossadegh in Iran, the career of Shishakli in Syria
as comic-opera. These “episodes” have a common mechanism and
a common portent. Although played by rules different from our
own, the Middle Eastern political game is deadly earnest and the
stakes are the future of the area.

For the stakes are nothing less than the meaning of Islam itself.
Both modernizers and traditionalists wish to reorganize secular
life within Islam. The question is: which Islam? The rational code
of Muhammad Iqbal portrays a very different Islam from the
illiterate society ruled by King Saud. As subversive doctrine,
indeed, President Nasser’s proposal to exploit the Hajj for cur-
rent political advantage is no less secularizing than Khalid M.
Khalid’s argument from Koranic communalism to modem so-
cialism. But these conflicting appeals to Islamic doctrine could
make sense only in two radically different real worlds of feel-
ing and behavior. The Middle East may choose either world,
but not both together. The choice will follow those spokesmen of
the New Feeling who show how Islam’s most cherished symbols
can be made compatible with the secular requirements of new
lifeways. This is why Nasser defines the “role in search of a hero”
as that of Spokesman— the clarifier of “who we are and what our
role is to be.” The Middle East today is at that critical juncture of
need, in Max Webers phrase, for “great rational prophecy.”

Until the conflict is reduced to less crucial terms, to problems
of technique rather than basic perspective, the quest for a satis-
fying identity will continue. Those who gain power to shape the
future will name the future, and by this name those who are
shaped will come to know themselves. Conversely, the ideological
issue will not be resolved until the sociological issue is more
clearly defined. Those who gain power will speak with the voice
of, or at least in the name of, a dominant segment of the society
as a whole. Who are to be this segment and who their spokesmen?

To cast the dramatis personae, the spokesmen and responsive
chorus of Middle East transition, it is useful to identify the central
characters who activate change and embody its meaning. Most
scholars agree on the importance of “the innovator,” but his

Retrospect and Prospect ( 407 )

snccific role varies with the interests of the observer. Westerners
concerned with economic development seek “the entrepreneur -
the innovating agent in their own social system and, possibly, an
indispensable figure in any modernizing system. Students of com-
munication seek “the Spokesman.” His particular traits vary in
different societies-in tire American-style system of mass consump-
tion he may be “the publicist,” in the Soviet-style system of mass
activism he may be "the agitator.” But he fills the same essential
function in all modernizing societies as innovator, in the symbolic
realm, of tire words by which men live.

“The Spokesman” is he who defines new identities for changing
persons, reshapes old expectancies and formulates new demands
to fit their new lifeways. Martin Luther played this crucial role,
as Erik II. Erikson has shown us, in guiding Western man through
die complex modernization of psyche called The Reformation.
It is the Spokesman who unlocks chambers of the mind, re-
leases the wellsprings of desire, opens new relationships between
Self and Society. 1 He discovers for men-on-the-move, in Nasser’s
plrrasc, “who we are and what our role is to be.” Every revo-
lutionary movement of this century has been led, through the
critical seizure of power, by its Spokesmen. Only later, in the
“consolidation” phase, were they replaced by the Administrators:
the loquacious Lenin by the silent Stalin, the articulate Atatiirk
by tire managerial Menderes. Throughout the Middle East today,
the continuing quest for a usable identity seeks its authentic Spokes-
men. Where will they come from? How will they operate?

This, is the problem of recruiting a functional new elite, and
no problem is more critical in a modernizing society. 2 Traditional
dynasties have toppled; elites formed under their reign seem in-
capable of governing without first reconstituting themselves. Then-
plight is illuminated by a series of expert "sector analyses”-Khad-
duri on The Army Officer, Issawi on The Entrepreneur, Franck on
Inc Economic Planners, Shafaq on The Clergy, W. C. Smith on
The Intellectuals. 3 While each sector exhibits widespread frustra-
tion, in none is this feeling more potent than among the intel-
lechmls-for no other sector is called upon to perform a function
io crucial in A e present phase of transition. To the intellectuals
biers look for clarification of the New Way. What can entre-

S \ hGn their pIans for indu strial expansion, as the
Egyptian Chambers of Industries complained in 1951, are dismissed

( 408 ) Retrospect and Prospect

by the demi-intelligentsia who run the government departments as
“ etablissements nuisibles”? What, in turn, can the government un-
dertake when "the masses of the people still seem to he dominated
by a passive contempt, if not active animosity, toward the state”? 4

The modernist intellectuals of Islam uneasily acknowledge their
obligation to devise and diffuse the new articles of faith that will
unify the elites and enlist the masses. But they have as yet found
no satisfying symbolism to subsume the rivalrous loyalties which
divide their cohorts and themselves. Against the symbols of mod-
ernism are raised the voices of tradition; against the symbols of
Arab-Muslim unity are counterposed the demands of Class and
Nation. Among the intellectuals these are often inner voices and
the debate is conducted internally by opposing selves. A process
of affective displacement is at work in the area, making its intel-
lectuals into psychic D.P.’s. As Hourani phrased it: “To be a Levan-
tine is to live in two worlds at once, without belonging to either.”

Throughout the Middle East, modernist intellectuals were
shaped in the Western system of thought and valuation. Very
many of them went to school in the West, whether abroad or in
western universities located between Cairo and Istanbul. They
look and act— and were trained to think— like modem men. Gibb
has shown how integral the Western exposure has become:

It is at the present time impossible to produce an adequate Arabic
translation of any advanced work of modem science or philosophy. Even
if the effort were made, the result would be unintelligible except to
those readers who could mentally retranslate it into the Western terms. 5

Their categories of . thought are those of the modem West. But
their modes of feeling are more equivocal, more accessible to solici-
tation from different sides.

The sharp rise of xenophobia in public emotion has made it
hard for intellectuals to establish the crucial but subtle point that
the Western genesis of their modem perspectives is, so to speak,
an historical accident; that thoughtways, once acquired, develop
an autonomous status; that the appropriate criteria for evaluating
modernism are not its antecedents but its consequences. Without
the historic rights of asylum provided by these propositions for
intellectuals in die West, many Middle Eastern intellectuals now
feel obliged to drift with the swelling tide of Islamic self-glori-
fication. Some become ashamed of their modernism and try to
hide it. Some, tormented by the sense that they have sinned,

Retrospect and Prospect ( 409 )

seek moral atonement through intellectual humiliation. Expia-
tion has taken one form in the voluminous outpouring of Islamic
apologetics, another through the self-immolating act (for a mod-
ernist intellectual) of adherence to the Ikhwan. Professor Smith
sees in this "the intellectuals’ intellect quite sold out to the
blind emotional fury of a nostalgic mob ." 0 Professor von Grune-
baum warns that the further this trahison des clercs goes in
the Middle East, "the more will [Islam] be forced to build a
‘modem’ house on fictitious traditionalist foundations .” 7

The failure to create an appropriate new symbolism, in a
rapidly changing society, produces an historical deformity— a psy-
chocultural gap between words and deeds that widens through
time and develops, ultimately, an explosive charge. If the new
words are missing that efficiently relate changing lifeways to
changing values, then events tend to take their meaning from
traditional symbolism— and from the stock of available attitudes
which are sustained by these symbols. What people say tends to
become incongruent with what they do. Under these conditions,
as many Middle Easterners complain, “hypocrisy” becomes a
public style and anxiety increases. The more attitudes and actions
get out of phase, the more radical becomes the treatment required
to restore equilibrium.

As the intellectual effort to reformulate Islam in a manner
more suitable to modernizing society became inhibited, a psychic
gap of serious proportions opened in the Middle East In some
lands, aphasia has gone further than in others. Egypt to take an
extreme case, seems increasingly the captive of a false position.
Seeking hegemony over the Arab area and primacy among Muslims
everywhere, Egypt has sought to erect a unifying symbolism on
the majority Arab-Muslim syndrome. But this corresponds poorly
to observable reality and provides no guidance for those men-in-
motion who most need new words to match their new ways. Current
Egyptian effort has done poorly by its Transitionals.

Turkey, die areas bright model of successful transition, met
new wants with candor. Favored by an early start under conditions
advantageous to rapid modernization, which included the splendid
clarity and courage of its leadership under Atatiirk, Turkey has
maintained a remarkable equilibrium of words and ways. Its
"communication revolution” shaped those new thoughts which
enabled the New Turks to maintain stability while rapidly acquir-
ing mobility. Thus Professor Smith:

( 410 ) Retrospect and Prospect

. . . what most distinguishes the Turks in the Islamic world of the
twentieth century is intellectual honesty. Nor does Turkey’s dynamic
advance leave undemonstrated the practical value of theoretical insight,
since they constitute the only people in contemporary Islam who have
really known what it is that they want . 8

What this has meant to living persons is what we sought to convey
in our parable of The Grocer, The Chief, and the sons of The
Chief in Balgat.

The parable is valid only insofar as the hypothesis that the
Middle East transition hinges upon its Transitionals is true. The
failure of existing elites to name and shape the newly-mobile men,
to incorporate their aspirations, has encouraged them to seek new
channels of their own design. To link the future with the Transi-
tionals’ acquisition of modernity is not to ignore those who already
are Modems. One will look long in tire West to find the intellectual
peers of individual Moderns now living in each Middle East land.
But one will look longer to find anything resembling the passive,
destitute, illiterate and altogether “submerged” mass which looms
so large in its sociological landscape. Not the quality of modernism,
but its quantity, is inadequate. The aim of modernization is pre-
cisely to narrow the gap between bottom and top, to create a
substantial “middle” sector— to increase the number of Transitionals
who compose the living reality of transition. Along with this goes
the need for a top-to-bottom consensus.

In die working out of such a consensus, the political problem
intermeshes with die sociological problem: how can these tradi-
tional agrarian societies be reshaped in a manner more suitable
for modem lifeways? For conceptions of the public good must
conform to the characteristics of the public involved. As an astute
observer of current Egyptian politics has remarked: “The military
regime, it might be more accurate to say, has really been seeking
to create a class to represent .” 9 Creating a class to represent requires
the creation of conditions in which new styles of life can be
rewarding for people willing to try them. If the goal is a modem
society, as most Middle East spokesmen today claim, then some
of the major conditions are quite clear. Required are a balanced
growtii of urbanism, a program of industrialization (shifting sur-
plus labor off the land into productive employment), education
in the skills required for modem urban industrial living.

Cash is an essential solvent in modem life and the achievement

Retrospect and Prospect { 411 )

of rising per capita income distribution is a major objective of
modem societies. Here the political and sociological problems of
the Middle East become intertwined with its economic problems.
Economies long caught in the vicious circle of poverty cannot
easily break through into the modem industrial system of expand-
ing production of goods and services. This reflects no inherent
and inevitable distaste for the good things of life among Middle
Eastern peoples. It reflects rather the difficult process-which in
the West occurred over several centuries— of stimulating desires
and providing means for satisfying them where neither desires
nor facilities have previously existed. Westerners engaged in Middle
East economic development problems long ago recognized that,
once a start is made, the reciprocity between desires and facilities
tends to operate in the Middle East as elsewhere . 10

The problem of stimulating productivity, many economists and
other professional observers agree, is basically "psychological .” 11
In die West, die problem turns upon “motivation”: one is moti-
vated to increase ones skill and output by the prospect of material
reward. Incentive systems tiiroughout modem society are a response
to this psychological proposition. More recently, in the West, the
idea has gained currency tiiat satisfaction with one's work situation
is also a motivation that leads to increasing efficiency— a proposition
which underlies much of current “human relations” activity in
industrial management.

In the Middle East the psychological problem is much more
rudimentary, perhaps more fundamental What is required there
to "motivate” the isolated and illiterate peasants and tribesmen
who compose the bulk of the area’s population is to provide them
with dues as to what the better things of life might be. Needed
tiiere is a massive growth of imaginativeness about alternatives
to dieir present life ways, and a simultaneous growth of institutional
means for handling these alternative lifeways. There is no sugges-
tion here that all Middle Easterners should learn to admire pre-
cisely the same things as people in the Western society. It is sug-
gested, much more simply, that before any enduring transformation
of the vicious circle of poverty can be started in the Middle East,
people there will have to learn about the lifeways evolved in other
societies. What they subsequently accept, adapt or reject is a
matter which each man will, in due course, decide for himself.

The issue, in fact, was joined several decades ago. There is a

( 412 ) Retrospect and Prospect

large and growing preoccupation with modem lifeways and major
efforts to adapt them to the Middle Eastern situation. Atatiirk
was the conspicuous model in the first half of this century. Others
who followed his lead, like Reza Shah in Iran, effected less com-
prehensive and enduring transformations, but they left their marks.
The “rising tide of expectation” has been clearly visible in the
Middle East since World War I. In the present decade, the
areas position as a major counter in the Cold War has compli-
cated the “natural” process of social change. Other slogans and
other policies have gained prominence. But the underlying re-
quirement remains the same— the need of every Spokesman for
an audience to rally and a constituency to represent.

Audiences and constituencies are composed of participant in-
dividuals. People “participate” in the public life of their country
mainly by having opinions about many matters which, in the
isolation of traditional society, did not concern them. Participant
persons have opinions on a variety of issues and situations which
they may never have experienced directly— such as what the gov-
ernment should do about irrigation, how the Algerian revolt could
be settled, whether money should be sent to Jordan or armies to
Israel, and so forth. By having and expressing opinions on such
matters a person participates in the network of public communica-
tion.

The media teach people participation of this sort by depicting
for them new and strange situations and by familiarizing them
with a range of opinions among which they can choose. Some
people learn better than others, the variation reflecting their dif-
ferential skill in empathy. For empathy, in the several aspects
illustrated throughout this book, is the basic communication skill
required of modem men. Empathy endows a person with the
capacity to imagine himself as proprietor of a bigger grocery store
in a city, to wear nice clothes and live in a nice house, to be inter-
ested in “what is going on in the world” and to “get out of his
hole.” With the spread of curiosity and imagination among a
previously quietistic population come the human skills needed for
social growth and economic development. On this psychological
fulcrum— involving nothing less than a characterological trans-
formation throughout the area— hinge the problems of the Middle
East. On the institutional capacity to provide this new style of
life hinge its prospects.

Appendices

Appendix A

The Questionnaire

Revision VI December 1950

Date of Interview

No. of Interviewer. Control No _____

Do you ever go to movies? Yes _No

Do you ever read a newspaper? Yes ___No

Do you ever listen to the radio? Yes No

1. In general, how do you feel about die movies?

2. a. About how often do you go?

Once or more a week? (If more, how often?)

Once or twice a month?

Three or four times a year?

Less than three times a year?

(If less than once or twice a month, ask question
b. If more often, ask c.)

b. Why don’t you go more often?

c. (If more often , ask:) In general, why do you go to the movies?

3. What sort of movies do you like best?

4. a. Which country makes this kind of movies best?

b. What is it about their movies that is better than others?

(Probe for names of other countries whose films respondent is
comparing.)

c. Do you remember a particular movie that is a good example of
what you have just mentioned?

5. What influence do you think the movies have on people who see
them?

( 415 )

( 416 ) Appendix A

6. Is there any place around here where movies are shown?

, , Yes No

(If yes, ask:) Why is it that you don’t go?

7. a. Did you ever see a movie? Yes No

(If yes , ask: When was the last time?)
b. Why haven’t you gone since then?

8. What do you think you miss by not going to the movies?

9. How do you think people who go to the movies differ from those
who don’t?

10. In general, how do you feel about the newspapers?

a. Do you read any newspaper? Yes __No

(If no, ash)

b. Do other people read the

newspaper to you? Yes No

(If no to this, skip to question 13)

(If yes, modify questions that follow to suit person who gets
paper read to him.)

11. How often do you read a newspaper?

Every day.

Several days a week.

Once a week.

Less than once a week.

(If read once a week or less, ash)

Why don’t you read a newspaper more often?

12. If the United Nations would publish a daily newspaper in each

country, do you think you would be interested in reading it?
Yes No Why do you feel this way?

13. What newspaper do you read now? (Name and place of pub-
lication. )

(If only one, ash) Why?

(If more than one, ash) Which of these do you prefer? Why?
( Probe here.)

14. What parts of the newspapers do you usually read? ( Read the
following list out loud, beginning one time with “ Foreign News
and the next time with “ Letters from Readers.” End by asking:
ANY OTHER?)

Foreign News

Domestic News

Sports

(417)

The Questionnaire

Socials

Main Editorials

. Small Editorials

Shipping News

...Translations (features)

Lottery Results

Art News and Reviews

Cartoons

Police Reports

Movie Announcement Reviews

Theatrical News and Reviews

Financial

Advertisements

■ Novels

Radio Program List

Cross Word Puzzle

Almanac

Poems

Letters from Readers

Other (specify)

15. a. Which parts interest you most? (Respondent should name at

least two.)

b. (Refer to first two parts just mentioned and for each ask:)

What is it about you especially like?

16. a. What parts of the newspaper interest you least?

b. (Refer to the first two parts just mentioned and for each ask:)

Why is it that you do not care for: ?

17. What land of people read ?

(Insert name of newspaper respondent prefers)

Why?

18. What newspaper do you like least?

What kind of people read it?

Why?

19. What influence do newspapers have on the people who read them?

20. If you were made editor of a newspaper what kind of a paper would
you run?

21. What other opinion do you have concerning newspapers you would
like to mention?

( 418 ) Appendix A

(Questions 22 through 26 to be asked only of non-newspaper readers)

22. a. Have you ever read a newspaper or had one read to you?

Yes No (If yes, ash) Which (alternative)?

b. (If yes, ask:) When was the last time?

c. Why is it that you don’t do that any more?

23. What do you think you miss by not knowing what the newspapers
have to say?

24. How do you think people who read newspapers differ from those
who don’t?

25. a. In general, are you interested in news about:

Foreign affairs

What the government is doing

What is going on in your own community

Sports

, Cultural affairs

Social affairs

„Editorials

Anything else

b. Which types of news (mentioned as being interested in) would
you say you are most interested in?

Why?

c. How do you get this news?

d. Which news are you least interested in?

Why?

26. What other opinions about newspapers would you like to mention?

27. In general, how do you feel about the radio?

28. Do you ever listen to the radio? Yes _ — No

(If yes, continue to question 29)

(If no, skip to question 44)

29. What stations are heard best?

(Specify.)

30. How often do you listen to the radio?

Almost every day.

Two or three days a week.

One day a week.

Less than one day a week.

(If less than one day a week, ask:)

Why is it that you do not listen more often?

The Questionnaire ( 419 )

(The following program questions are designed to measure competence
to fudge on the basis of familiarity with radio schedules for individual
programs, so we do not press for information as to hours, days , etc. We
are not so much interested in such information as in seeing simply
whether the respondent knows.)

31. a. Which radio program do you like best? What time is it on?

What day? What station? How often do you listen to it? (If no
specific program known, say:) What kind of things do you like
to hear on the radio? ( Put answers in space 1 below.)
b. Which radio program do you like next best? "What time is it
on? What day? What station? How often do you listen?

How often

Title of program Time Day Station listen

l._ -

2..

32. Can you describe program 1 to me? What is it like? Program 2?

33. Just what is it about program 1 that you like so well?

About program 2? ( Probe here. If necessary reword this question
to avoid getting the answer already given above. If previous ques-
tion was probed extensively, then skip this question.)

34. a. (If favorite programs are foreign, ask : ) What do you think of
the programs broadcast on local stations here?

b. (If news not mentioned as favorite, ask:) How often do you
listen to news on the radio? (If relatively seldom, ask:) How
is it you do not listen to news more often?

35. Do you think any of the people who talk regularly on the radio
and present programs should give their own names so you would
get to know them?

— .Yes No Don’t care

(If yes, ash) Which ones?

Why?

36. a. Where are you when you usually listen?

b. Is there any place else that you sometimes listen?

Usually Sometimes

At home.

At a friend’s home.

At a coffee house.

At a school-house.

At a store.

Anywhere else.

( Here specify.)

( 420 ) Appendix A

37. In general, do you usually plan ahead of time what you listen to

on the radio or do you usually just listen at random?
Plan ahead Listen at random

Why is this?

38. Who usually decides what programs you listen to at:

How about at: :

39. What kind of people do you think listen to:

( Insert name or type of program respondent chose as No. 1)

40. a. What type of programs don’t you like to listen to?

b. What is it about (the type of program mentioned) that you dis-
like? (Do not ask this about more than two types.)

c. (If radio plays not discussed along these lines earlier, ash)

What do you think about the plays on the radio? How do they
make you feel?

41. Are there some days during the week that you are more likely to
listen than others?

Yes No

(If yes, ash) Which days?

Why these?

42. If you were put in charge of a radio station, what kinds of programs
would you like to put on? (Probe here.)

43. What other opinion do you have about radio that you would like
to mention?

(Questions 44 through 52 to be asked only of non-radio listeners)

44. Do you know if there are any radio sets around here?

Yes _No

(If yes, ask:) Where?

Why don’t you ever listen there?

45. Have you ever heard the radio?

Yes No

(If yes, ask:) When was the last time?

Why haven’t you listened since?

46. Have you ever been in a group that gathered together for the pur-
pose of listening to a specific program?

Y es_ _N o

(If yes, ask: ) The last time this happened, what was the occasion?

47. What do you think you miss by not listening to the radio?

The Questionnaire ( 421 )

,jg p 0 you know anybody who does listen to the radio?

’ Yes ! No

(If yes, ash) What do you think he (or they) get out of listening?

49 How do you think people who listen to the radio are different from
those who do not listen?

50. What would have to happen for you to listen to the radio?

51. If you had access to a radio, what type of programs would you
especially like to listen to? What is it about these that you like?
(for each).

52. What other opinion do you have about radio that you would like
to mention?

(The following will help indicate which respondents know what they’re
talking about when we ask some of them for mental images of foreign
radio later.)

(Questions 1, 2 and 3 to be asked of all respondents, and answers noted
on check list below using numbers to show order of mention.)

53. 1. Do you know what foreign countries make broadcasts that can
be heard here? (any language )

2. Do you know which of these foreign countries send broadcasts
in the Arabic language for us to listen to?

3. Which of the foreign countries get their programs rebroadcast
by local stations? (In what language?)

(Do not read following list to respondents. Merely check whichever they
remember.)

1

Can be
heard

America

Egypt

France

Germany

Great Britain .

Greece

Uah-

Pakistan

Romania -

Russia

2

Arabic

language

3

Rebroadcast
by local
stations

Language

of

program

re-broadcast

Appendix A

( 422 )

Switzerland

Turkey

Others:

( The following question deals directly with official foreign channels of
communication. Some interesting psychological data related to the phe-
nomenon of “ selective perception ” should result if this is properly probed.
Consequently, it should be asked of everybody. Refer to column 2 in the
previous question. If the large powers were mentioned, U.S.A., Great
Britain or Russia, ask about each named. If not, ask about other countries.
Ask about three countries, not just one, provided three are mentioned.
Do not ask about more than three. Please write answers in spaces below.)

54. Why do you think broadcasts in Arabic?

(country)

(country)

( The following question serves to separate those who listen to foreign
broadcasts from those who do not.)

55. a. Do you ever listen to broadcasts direct from foreign countries?

Yes No

b. Do you ever listen to rebroadcasts here on local stations of foreign
programs?

Yes No

(If no to both questions a and b, ask:)

56. Do you think you miss anything by not hearing programs broad-
cast from other countries?

Yes No

(If yes to question 56, ask:) What?

(If no to question 56, ask:) Wiry not?

(If no to both 55a and b, skip to questions about newsreels, unless
respondent is a non-movie- goer. If respondent is a non-movie-goer,
then skip to media comparison questions.)

( The following questions deal with listeners to foreign radio programs.
Always remember that we do not want more than a few of such people
in our total sample.)

57. How often do you listen to broadcasts from foreign countries?

Almost every day.

2 or 3 days a week.

1 day a week.

The Questionnaire ( 423 )

1 or 2 days a month,

L ws than once a month. .

5S. In the last month, which countries have you definitely heard broad-
casting? (Write answers in spaces below.) How do you usually
find out what programs will be broadcast by each of these?

Names of countries Usually find out what programs broadcast bv:

(If rcsjiondcnt docs not find out, ash) Is there any place you could
find out for (each) ? Do you care?

59. a. Which one of these foreign countries that you heard during the

last month did you hear most often?

b. Did you hear it direct or rebroadcast?

(Skip if not applicable.)

c. How is it that you heard this country most often?

60. a. Which country did you hear next most often?

b. Did you hear it direct or rebroadcast?

(Skip if not applicable.)

61. a. Which one of those heard did you listen to least?

b. Did you hear it direct or robroadcast?

( Skip if not applicable.)

62. Which is your favorite country for listening to?

Why?

(If two favorite programs given earlier were foreign, skip to question
66ii below. If only one of two favorite programs given earlier was for-
eign, then refer to this earlier discussion and ask if there is another
foreign program, a second one, which respondent likes to hear.)

63. a. Which foreign program (not station) do you like best?

b. What other foreign program you like next best?

How often

Name of program Station Day Time listen

a. . ■

b

c. Can you describe these programs to me? What are they like?

64. What about program (a) makes you like it so well? program (b)?

Appendix A

( 422 )

Switzerland

Turkey

Others:

( The following question deals directly with official foreign channels of
communication. Some interesting psychological data related to the phe-
nomenon of “ selective perception” should result if this is properly probed.
Consequently, it should be asked of everybody. Refer to column 2 in the
previous question. If the large powers were mentioned, U.S.A., Great
Britain or Russia, ask about each named. If not, ask about other countries.
Ask about three countries, not just one, provided three are mentioned.
Do not ask about more than three. Please write answers in spaces below.)

54. Why do you think broadcasts in Arabic?

(country)

(country)

( The following question serves to separate those who listen to foreign
broadcasts from those who do not.)

55. a. Do you ever listen to broadcasts direct from foreign countries?

Yes No

b. Do you ever listen to rebroadcasts here on local stations of foreign
programs?

Yes No

(If no to both questions a and b, ask:)

56. Do you think you miss anything by not hearing programs broad-
cast from other countries?

Y es N o

(If yes to question 56, ask:) What?

(If no to question 56, ask:) Why not?

(If no to both 55a and b, skip to questions about newsreels, unless
respondent is a non-movie-goer. If respondent is a non-movie-goer,
then skip to media comparison questions. )

(The following questions deal with listeners to foreign radio programs.
Always remember that we do not want more than a few of such people
in our total sample.)

57. How often do you listen to broadcasts from foreign countries?

Almost every day.

2 or 3 days a week.

1 day a week.

( 423 )

The Questionnaire

1 or 2 days a month.

L ess than once a month.

58. In the last month, which countries have you definitely heard broad-
casting? ( Write answers in spaces below.) How do you usually
find out what programs will be broadcast by each of these?

Names of countries Usually find out what programs broadcast by:

(If respondent does not find out, ask: ) Is there any place you could
find out for (each) ? Do you care?

59. a. Which one of these foreign countries that you heard during the

last month did you hear most often?

b. Did you hear ft direct or rebroadcast?

(Skip if not applicable.)

c. How is it that you heard this country' most often?

60. a. Which country did you hear next most often?

b. Did you hear it direct or rebroadcast?

(Skip if not applicable.)

61. a. Which one of those heard did you listen to least?

b. Did you hear it direct or rebroadcast?

(Skip if not applicable.)

62. Which is your favorite country for listening to?

Why?

(If two favorite programs given earlier were foreign, skip to question
G6a below. If only one of two favorite programs given earlier was for-
eign, then refer to this earlier discussion and ask if there is another
foreign program, a second one, which respondent likes to hear.)

63. a. Which foreign program (not station) do you like best?
b. What other foreign program you like next best?

How often

Name of program Station Day Time listen

a

b.

c. Can you describe these programs to me? What are they like?

64. What about program (a) makes you like it so well? program (b)?

( 424 ) Appendix A

(Ask question 65 about the 2 foreign programs mentioned, whether
under Question 31, page 5 or above.)*

65. Do you remember where you first heard about program (a)?
About program (b)?

66. a. Are there any foreign broadcasts that you would especially like

to listen to but cannot?

Y es N o

b. Why is it you cannot hear them?

c. What have you heard about this (these) stations that makes
you want to listen?

67. a. What foreign programs have you heard, either direct or on the

local station, that you particularly disliked?

b. What country (s) did they come from?

c. What was it about them that you disliked?

68. a. With regard to news about the war, which foreign country

would you say gives the most reliable and accurate information
in its news broadcasts?

b. What makes you think that broadcasts from (this country) are
more reliable than the broadcasts from other countries?

69. What country do you suppose gives the least accurate information
about the Korean war?

70. a. Which foreign country do you think broadcasts the best enter-

tainment programs?

b. Can you give an example?

c. What makes you think the entertainment programs from (this
country) are better than those from other countries?

71. Which country gives the least entertaining programs, according to
your personal taste?

72. Which foreign country do you think tries to give the most accurate
picture in its broadcasts of its own way of life? ( Probe for com-
petence to judge, examples, etc. )

73. a. From what you have heard people say, what country do you

think makes the most radio propaganda?
b. Have you heard an example of the way they go about this?

74. Referring now again to the radio programs broadcast at different
times of day on foreign stations, or rebroadcast on the local stations,

° Refers to political propaganda, as more relevant to these days.

The Questionnaire ( 425 )

have you ever heard any you thought worth talking about with
other people?

- .Yes N o

(// yes) Which program (s)?

Whom did you talk about it with? ( Age and occupation)

Wlmt made you want to tell him (her)? (for each)

Did he (she) L'sten because you talked about the program?

Yes No Don’t know

(If no, ask:) Why not?

75. What other things would you like to say about foreign radio?

76. a. Which country makes the newsreels you like best?

b. What is it about them that is better than the newsreels from other
‘ countries?

c. How often do you see newsreels when you go to movies?

every time hardly ever

sometimes never

77. Is there any difference in the truthfulness of newsreel news and
radio news?

- Yes No

(If yes, ash) What is the difference?

78. What other ideas about movies or newsreels would you like to
mention?

(In the following question, be sure respondent understands what a
Documentary Film is.)

79. a. Have you ever seen any foreign documentary films?

Yes No

(If no, skip to media comparison questions)

b. Do you remember one that you particularly liked?

Yes No

c. (If yes, ask:) Where did you see it?

d. What was it about it you particularly liked?

Title

e. What country made it?

f. Do you remember one that you disliked?

Yes No

g. (If tjes, ask:) Where did you see it?

h. What country had made it?

i. What was it about it that you particularly disliked?
Title

{ 426 ) Appendix A

80. Would you like to see more of them?

Yes No

(If yes, ask: ) On what subject?

Media Comparison

81. The last time you got news (meaning today or yesterday) how did

you get it— by radio, newspaper or did somebody else tell you?

Radio domestic.

Radio foreign.

Newspaper.

Word of mouth (Who told you?) ( Get age and occupation.)

When?

82. a. Do you remember two pieces of news that you learned at that time?

Yes No

(If yes, ask:) What were they about?

1 ..

2

b. How did you feel when you heard about (1)?

c. Did you happen to mention this to anybody?

Yes No

(If yes, ask:) Tell me something about the person you talked
to. (Age, occupation, social status) What was said?

d. How did you feel when you learned about (2)?

(If no to question (c), ash)

What about the second?

(Only ask question (e) if no news remembered on Questions 81
and 82.)

e. Many people have difficulty remembering news they hear the
same day. Why do you suppose this is so?

83. Where do you usually get your news?

84. Of all the interest you have in doing things like reading newspapers,
listening to radio, and going to movies— those three— what part of
that interest, what percentage of it, what fraction, would you assign
to newspaper reading compared to radio and to movies?

Per cent Interest in newspapers

Per cent Interest in radio

Per cent Interest in movies

100 Per cent Total interest in such activities
(If not apparent from earlier answers, ask:) How is it you have a
greater interest in:

( 426 ) Appendix A

80. Would you like to see more of them?

— Yes No

(If yes, ash) On what subject?

Media Comparison

81. The last time you got news (meaning today or yesterday) how did

you get it— by radio, newspaper or did somebody else tell you?

Radio domestic.

.Radio foreign,

Newspaper.

.Word of mouth (Who told you?) ( Get age and occupation.)

When?

82. a. Do you remember two pieces of news that you learned at that time?

Yes No

(If yes, ask:) What were they about?

1 .

2 .

b. How did you feel when you heard about (1)?

c. Did you happen to mention this to anybody?

Yes No

(If yes, ash) Tell me something about the person you talked
to. (Age, occupation, social status) What was said?

d. How did you feel when you learned about (2)?

(If no to question (c), ask: )

What about the second?

(Only ask question (e) if no news remembered on Questions 81
and 82.)

e. Many people have difficulty remembering news they hear the
same day. Why do you suppose this is so?

83. Where do you usually get your news?

84. Of all the interest you have in doing things like reading newspapers,
listening to radio, and going to movies— those three— what part of
that interest, what percentage of it, what fraction, would you assign
to newspaper reading compared to radio and to movies?

Per cent Interest in newspapers

Per cent Interest in radio

Per cent Interest in movies

100 Per cent Total interest in such activities
(If not apparent from earlier answers, ash) How is it you have a
greater interest in:

The Questionnaire ( -127 )

85. Do you remember hearing a discussion lately between people about
something in the news?

Yes No

(If yes , probe for what kinds of persons and what all about.)

SO. If for some reason we had to close down all of our radio stations or
all of our newspapers, which would you rather see happen? Why?

87. Thinking of radio and newspapers: ( Check answers on chart below.)

a. Which do you think generally gives the news about foreign affairs
first? How about news about domestic politics?

b. Which do you think gives the most complete news about foreign
affairs? How about news about domestic politics?

c. Which do you think gives the most truthful news about foreign
affairs?

Foreign Affairs Domestic Relations

Radio Newspapers No diff. Radio Newspapers No diff.

First

Most complete

Most truthful

d. What makes you think is more truthful than the

other on foreign affairs? On domestic politics?

( Probe for reasons where differences in attitude on domestic
and foreign news.)

Mental Images and Stereotypes

( The next section is designed to get the mental images of respondents
towards the world. We shall see whether people who are psychologically
indifferent have the same general mental picture as those who are
greatly concerned. We shall also try to measure competence to judge.)

88. a. Do you understand any foreign language?

Yes No

b. (If yes, ask:) Which ones?

(Interviewer should test his knowledge a little if possible and
mark down how well he speaks.)

c. Do you read any newspapers or magazines published in this
(these) language(s)?

Yes No

d. (If yes, ask: ) Which ones?

e. How do the contents differ from newspapers (magazines) which
are published in our country?

( 428 ) Appendix A

89. a. In the last four years, about how many foreigners have you had

the occasion to know and talk with? ( Write approximate number.)

b. What nationalities? ( Mark answer on list below.)

French Others ( Specify )

Italian

American

British

90. Have you ever visited any foreign countries?

Yes No

Which ones? When

91. From what you know or have been told about other countries, what
two words can you think of that best describe the people who live
in each of the following countries? I do not want to know whether
the country is rich or poor, but what land of people live in these
countries.

a. In general, the French are:

&.

( Where a blank is inserted in asking a question, -fill it with reference
to the country in which the interview is being made.)

b. In general, the are:

&

c. In general, the Americans are:

&

d. In general, the English are:

&

e. In general, the Russians are:

&

92. If for some reason, you could not live in our country, what other
country would you choose to live in?

Why?

(Take criterion given by respondent as reason for living there,
and ask how he feels about the same point in discussing the other
countries under Question 94.)

93. Suppose that I could tell you anything you wanted to know about
(country mentioned as most want to live in). What two questions
would you be most interested in asking? (Do not probe.)

1 .

2 .

The Questionnaire ( 429 )

91. (If not mentioned) flow about Great Britain— how would you feel
about living there? Why?

Russia?

United States?

(// U.S.A. not mentioned as country respondent would choose to
lice in, ash)

Suppose that I could tell you anything you wanted to know about
U.S.A., what two questions would you be most interested in asking?

95. a. Do you know what U.N, is? (get definition).

b. Where is the United Nations meeting now?

c. Do you remember who is the Secretary General?

96. a. How do you feel about the behavior of the United States in

world affairs? How about its behavior towards our country?
(Among other things, probe for past changes in opinion which
might be psychologically revealing.)

How long have you felt that way?

b. Have you, yourself, seen any specific examples of this behavior?
(Have you changed your attitude about U.S.A. recently?)

c. What part, what proportion, of the information you get about
that country comes from newspapers, what part from movies,
what part from radio, and what part from other peoples?

Per cent Newspapers

Per cent Movies

Per cent Radio

Per cent Other people

100 Per cent Total

97. a. How do you feel about the behavior of Russia in world affairs?

How about its behavior towards our country'? (Probe also for
changes.)

How long have you felt that way?

b. Have you yourself seen any specific examples of this behavior?
(Have you changed your attitude about Russia recently?)

c. Where do you hear most about what Russia is doing . . . news-
papers, newsreels, radio, or from what people say?

. - Per cent Newspapers

Per cent Newsreels

Per cent Radio

Per cent What people say

100 Per cent Total

9S. a. What about the behavior of Great Britain in world affairs? To-
wards us? (Probe, also, for changes.)

( 430 ) Appendix A

How long have you felt that way?

b. Have you, yourself, seen any specific examples of this behavior?
(Have you changed your attitude about Britain recently?)

c. Where do you hear most about what Great Britain is doing?
Newspapers, newsreels, radio, or what people say?

Per cent Newspapers

Per cent Newsreels

Per cent Radio

Per cent What people say

100 Per cent Total

Psychological Characteristics

99. a. In general, how do yon feel about your life . . . are you happy
with the way things have turned out for you, or not? Which of
the following best describes how you feel?

Very happy. Fairly unhappy.

Fairly happy. Very unhappy.

b. What in particular makes you feel this way?

100. a. What is the biggest problem that people in the same circum-

stances as yourself face in life?

b. Is there anything that you as an individual can do to solve this
problem? (If no, ask:) Why not?

101. a. What would you say is the biggest problem that our country as a

nation faces today?

b. Generally would you say that the problem is very difficult, fairly
difficult, or fairly easy to solve?

Very difficult

Fairly difficult

Fairly easy

c. What do you think people in the same circumstances as yourself
can do to help solve this problem?

102. Suppose that you were made head of the government. What are
some of the things you would do?

(If no answer, say:)

Many people have difficulty trying to answer this question. Why
do you suppose that is?

103. How do you feel about the possibility of another world war starting

within the next two years? ( Read the following to respondent.)
Very sure there will be a world war within two years.

(431 )

The Questionnaire

.Fairly sure there will be.

.Fairly doubtful there will be.

.Definitely do not think there will be a world war within
the next two years.

Background Characteristics

Now tell me something about yourself.

104. What is your occupation?

105. How do you like your work?

Very much.

Fairly much.

Only a little.

106. a. What are some of the things you like to do in your spare time?

b. Which of these things do you like to do best? ( Mark “1”). Which
next best? ( Mark “2".) Which least?

c. Which do you spend the most time doing? The least?

Activity Like Most Like Least Most Time Least Time

107. Which would you prefer . . . would you rather have a great number
of friends whom you know fairly well or only a few friends whom
you know very well?

Very many friends: know fairly well.

Only a few friends: know very well.

108. Do you think that the people who are successful achieve their suc-
cess mainly because of the friends that they have who help them
along or mainly because of their own skill and knowledge?

Mainly because of friends.

Mainly because of own skill and knowledge.

109. Has anyone come to you for advice recently? If so, what in general
was it about and who was the person? (Age, occupation, social
status, and relationship.)

Yes No

Why do you tliink he came to you for advice?

110. Have you, yourself, gone to anyone for advice recently? If so, what

( 432 )

was it oh i Appendix A

«ge, occupation"^ 1 ! 0 '? S the P«on? ( Ask ,

you go "o Ctfltf ”‘ iR

b - your°acC e^lT °, f worship?

Z ery , im P°rtan t.

" Fairly important.

" ft little important.

Not important at a]J.

m '*Sm% F y ^C^oo^ics:

Age^Z^lT U Y0 “ Ab ^ S “ Ansra)

/to -Religion

( lease write exact religious sect.)

-Age of Eldest Child

-No. of Children

Marital status :

— Single

— Married

— -Divorced

Separated

— ■ — - — Widowed

-Age of Youngest Child
Education :

Literacy :

-Almost none
— Elementary
—High school
~ College or Univ.
-Professional School
(Law, Medicine, etc.)

■ Illiterate
-Can read but not wife
Can read and write

-Place of birth

Technical School

t , of birth

2D?" “ Pla ° e ^ y0U s P“ d ™»t of your life befora aga o

Present residence

TT . ~

*

Housing conditions — _____
Socioeconomic Status:
Relative to neighborhood

Relative to Bxed standard

— — Destitute

.Poor

-Modest

—Well-off

-Mich

(433)

The Questionnaire

If respondent owns radio:

Make of Radio

Type

Crystal Set

.Battery Set

Regular Set

Can Hear: Long Wave:

Condition

Good Working Order'

Works Poorly

Broken

Medium: Short:

113. Language in which interview conducted:

114. How much interest did respondent show in knowing which uni-
versities are cooperating in this psychological study?

115. a. What clubs or similar organizations do you belong to?
b. How much time do you spend in these activities?

116. What did you think of this interview?

117. Please write your own psychological description of respondent, in-
cluding short physical description, mention of occupation and
social role, type of neighborhood, type of personality, and his
psychological attitude during interview, plus any other useful
observations.

Appendix B

Replication of the Empathy Index

SEVERAL YEARS after the original typology had been devel-
oped and applied to the Turkish data, a graduate thesis replicated its
test of empathy on the Syrian respondents. 0 The report on Turkey had
shown that urbanism, education, age and socioeconomic status (SES)
were associated with media behavior; but predictions based on these
factors alone failed to account for known regularities of media partici-
pation. There were too many deviant cases, particularly on the lower
sociological levels, where people of similar background were found to
differ in exposure and response to the media. Mr. Marsh cross-tabulated
the apposite data on empathic, semi-empathic, non-empathic respond-
ents (See Table). He then adapted the original Empathy Index to the
Syrian interviews, with results leading to these conclusions:

“Analysis has demonstrated that the association between empathy
and the following items of media behavior persists, and is therefore rela-
tively autonomous, at the .05 level of significance or higher, with respect
to the following homogeneous educational, SES, and age groups:

“I. With respect to low education, in accounting for dependence
upon word-of-mouth sources of news.

“2. With respect to high education and younger age in account-
ing for preference for Western music radio programs.

“3. With respect to low education in accounting for preference
for Arab League countries’ radio stations.

“ 4 . With respect to low education and middle SES in accounting
for preference for foreign news in newspapers.

“5. With respect to low education and middle and low SES, in

° This is a condensation of conclusions in R. M. Marsh, Marginal Pro-
jectivity and Communication Behavior in Modem Syria (M.A. Thesis, Co-
lumbia University, 1953). The term “projectivity,” which was used in the
original Turkish report, has been conformed to the term empathy used m
this book.

(434 )

Replication of the Empathy Index ( -135 )

accounting for preference for domestic-national news in newspapers.

"0. With respect to low education and middle SES, in account-
ing for preference for the Syria national radio.

“7, With respect to low education and middle and low SES, in
accounting for high frequency newspaper reading.

"In all these designated respects, empathy continues to manifest a
degree of autonomy which is significant at the .05 level or higher. But
die full value of the concept is not exhausted at this statistical level;
radier, this statistical support for the hypotheses of the study enables
us to impute even greater stability to the underlying pattern whose
emergence has been noted above. This pattern can now be described in
the following way: The Index of Empathy is more sensitive to the
demographic and media behavior characteristic of the low educated
and die low (and sometimes middle) SES groups than to the high
educated and high SES groups.

‘This pattern first became evident in the discussion of the demo-
grapliic profile of the empathy types. There, it was observed that there
was not so high an association between various demographic indices
and die high empathy group as there was between the demographic
indices and the low empathy group. In concrete terms, such background
factors as high formal education, elite occupations, urban residence, and
particular religious affiliation— the very factors which might be expected
to differentiate the empathic people from the less empathic people—
these factors are not associated markedly with empathy. On the basis
of this sample and the Index constructed, such ‘empathy-stimulating’
factors as high education, elite occupation, etc., do not give rise to the
characteristic ability to identify with an enlarged and unfamiliar sphere
of human activity. Instead of this, these factors appear to result in a
fairly even distribution of Empathy Index types.

“In the discussion of die demographic profile of the empathy types,
it was not until such background factors as low education, low occu-
pational stratum, housewife status, low SES, rural residence, and re-
ligious affiliation per se were taken into consideration that an association
of some significance was observed. For the resultant of these back-
ground factors was not a more or less equal distribution among all the
empathy types, but a clear clustering in the non-empathic type.

'Therefore, die first general aspect of this pattern is diat while high
education, elite occupation, urban residence, and particular religious
affiliation do not definitely lead to the ability and willingness to identify
with a larger and unfamiliar sphere of human activity, the converse
factors (low education, low occupational stratum, etc.) do lead rather
definitely to the inability and unwillingness to identify with a larger

( 436 ) Appendix B

and unfamiliar sphere of human activity, as measured bv the Enins?* •
Index. 1

“Since the Index permitted a more clear location and a more specSe
definition of the non-empathic type than of the other types, it followed
that the operation of empathy would be most significant with respvct
to the groups homogeneous as to low education and middle and Sow
SES, in this case. This is the second general aspect of the configuration
which emerges from this analysis.

“Both of the major hypotheses of this study have been verified, „i
least partially. That is, the construction of the Index of Empathy hu
enabled a prediction of media behavior. The people with high empathy
scores tended to be more highly exposed to the mass media, minimally
exposed to word-of-mouth communication of news, and critical in their
preferences for different types of media. And in several important ‘cases,*
these findings were not simply a spurious association, with education
or SES being the real determinant, but were, in fact, genuine determi-
nants of media behavior. In lieu of the introduction of further 'hide-

Syrian Correlates of Empathy

Seal-

tisn-

H

Empaihic

Empathic

Er-patltk

N

249*

55

94

100

Sax

Mala

200

26%

35%

40%

Female

49

10

39

51

Aga

33%

30 and under

109

28%

39%

3 MO

52

25

35

40

41-50

46

15

37

43

51 and over

39

11

33

51

Education

Illiterate

62

5%

21%

74'/,

Elementary or leu

84

14

45

41

Secondary or more

102

39

42

19

SES

Dostitule, poor

91

12%

34%

54%

Modest

91

22

40

33

Well-off, rich

65

34

4t

25

Occupational Class!'

41%

13%

Elite

73

41%

Middle

79

23

39

33

lower

4 i

9

29

62

Housewives

26

46

54

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Replication of the Empathy Index ( 437 )

pendent variables/ the conclusion must be that the Index of Empathy
has not simply gotten at a duplication of formal education or SES.
It has elicited from the respondents an orientation to larger and un-
familiar world perspectives which, in the foregoing designated respects,
is relatively independent of education and SES in accounting for various
facets of mass communications media behavior in modem Syria.”

The thesis went on to suggest further uses for the Empathy Index
as follows:

"The hypothesis for future research is that the Index of Empathy
will uncover systematic variations which we have termed ‘covert’ as-
pects of mass media behavior— variations which cannot be accounted
for on the basis of the factors of education, SES, and so forth. To cite
an example, all people with elementary education might have a similar
amount of exposure to the media, but not a similar type of ‘quality* of
exposure. The people with high empathy scores in this homogeneous
group might, more often than those with lower empathy scores, go
beyond the stimuli of the media to construct imaginative sequels, criti-
cisms, and alternatives."

Mr. Marsh then concluded:

“It is hoped that this cursory review will suggest that the notion of
world-mindcdness, or empathy, is of more than academic importance.
It has relevance for a wide range of social phenomena, especially prob-
lems of social change, communications behavior, and political sociology.”

Appendix C

The Latent Structure Analysis 0

A CENTRAL PURPOSE of this book has been to analyze
modernization as a process with some distinctive quality of its own,
which would explain why modernity is felt as a consistent whole among
people who live by its rules. We know that urbanization, industrial-
ization, secularization, democratization, education, media participation
do not occur in haphazard and unrelated fashion even though we often
are obliged to study them singly. Our multiple correlations (chapter II)
showed them to be so highly associated as to raise the question whether
some are genuinely independent factors at all— suggesting that perhaps
they went together so regularly because, in some historical sense, they
had to go together.

What we needed was a unifying factor of response made by people
living in a modernizing environment. This unifying factor, or key vari-
able, we identified as “style of life.” The evidence of our interview’s in
country after country showed that, if one could classify a person as
Modem or Transitional or Traditional, then one could regularly predict
many other things about him. How, then, do modernization of a society
and changing lifestyles among its people go together? This is the familiar
quest of the social scientist for reciprocity between his models of indi-
vidual and institutional behavior.

The method we adopted was Latent Structure Analysis (LSA), de-
veloped by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, to test rigorously whether a variety of
particular opinions contains some single more general attitude. The
mathematical and technical complexities are such that we must refer
the reader interested in methodology to Lazarsfeld’s own exposition,
contenting ourselves here with a summary statement of the conception
underlying what we did and why. The fundamental concept of LSA

• I wish to thank P. L. Berkman for “processing” my typology through
the complex computations of latent structure analysis and R. H. Somers tor
expert advice on this report.

( 433 )

The Latent Structure Analysis ( 439 }

is Freud's proposition that the varied overt activities of an individual—
his “manifest behavior"— can be correlated with, and hence predicted
from, the latent structure of 1 us attitudes. A person’s attitudes form a
"latent structure" when, underlying their apparent diversity, some com-
mon element can be identified which renders them compatible and
consistent with a personality trait of the individual in question. Such
structures are "latent" because they are not overtly expressed in par-
ticular actions; in fact, said Freud, manifest activities are more or less
deliberately designed to obscure the latent structure, which is the indi-
vidual's personality— his secret. The latent structure can only be inferred
from repeated observation of varied actions by the same individual.
Accordingly, the Freudian concept was applied for many decades only
in clinical analysis of individual cases, often pathological cases.

Lazarsfeld provided a method by which a latent structure could be
inferred from an individual’s responses to a questionnaire—his expressed
opinions constituting, in this case, his manifest behavior. By this method,
behavioral characteristics can properly be inferred from the frequency
of expressed opinions among many individuals; hence the derivation of
latent structures can be extended from clinical cases to sample surveys.
For our purpose we adapted LSA, which is a brilliant innovation in
factorial analysis, to a special type of factorial problem.

Our typology classified individuals according to “sociological” (rather
than altitudinal) factors— e.g., urbanism, literacy, socioeconomic status,
media participation. The statistical studies reported in chapter II showed
that a matrix of these factors, around the world, consistently differen-
tiated Modem from Traditional countries. The application to our Middle
Eastern data, in chapter III, showed that individuals could also be dif-
ferentiated by a personality mechanism called empathy. The underlying
theoretical hypothesis holds that empathy is more functional in Modem
than in Traditional society. The next question was whether empathic
personality and modem sociological attributes occur together so regu-
larly in the same individuals as to justify the assumption of some more
fundamental or latent attribute underlying both. LSA did verify the
existence of the latent attribute which we call "style of life”; and it per-
mitted the identification of three rank orders— 1 Traditional, Transitional,
Modem-along a single basic scale composed of all five factors in our
typology.

The data subjected to LSA came from the total of 1,357 interviews
in hand when the test was taken. 0 The hvo-class model of LSA was
used. Here the procedure is to dichotomize the data on each item in

0 Distributed as follows; Turkey 257, Lebanon 262, Egypt, 259, Syria 200,
Jordan 263, Iran U6,

( 440 ) Appendix C

the test. Positive (+) and negative (— ) are terms without intrinsic
meaning and are used merely to identify the high and low scorers on
each item. This procedure later tests empirically its own initial assump-
tion that the sample population can be accounted for by two latent
classes (such as Modern and Traditional). It does so by determining the
most probable item-patterns of each class; in so doing the latent para-
meters generate data which identify the “refruitment base” for each
item-pattern. This surplus information enabled us, in the present test,
to derive from the two-class model our three-class typology.

We have already explained the theoretical grounds for our selection
of urbanization, literacy, SES, media exposure and empathy in chapter
II. For the LSA, variant definitions were used to dichotomize (+ or — )
each item and the scoring procedure may be recapitulated as follows:

T able 1 — LSA Dichotomous Scoring Procedure

ftam

Urbanism

Literacy

SES

Media Exposure
Empathy

+

communities over 2,000
secondary or higher education
high-status occupations
scored 7-12 on media index
scored 3-6 on projective questions

communities under 2,000
elementary or less education
low-status occupations
scored 0-6 on media index
scored 0-2 on projective questions

Naturally, as in any dichotomous scoring procedure, the line that divides
+ from — is arbitrary. On the SES and literacy items, our division
seems generally acceptable: several area experts agreed that our classi-
fication of “high” and “low” occupations would be adhered to rather
widely throughout the area. On the media exposure and empathy items,
the boundary between + and — was limited by the wording of our
questionnaire and there was no viable alternative. On urbanism, for
which we have used 20,000 and 50,000 as our usual boundaries in this
book, we took account of the objections made by several experts that
these were too high. They argued that, in the Middle East setting, indi-
viduals living in communities over 2,000 are already “townspeople” with
many characteristics of urbanites. This did not square with our own im-
pressions, but the weight of expert testimony was conceded. Using these
dichotomies, the item-by-item results are shown in Table 2. The first
row gives the probability that a literate respondent will come from
either of the latent classes (I or II), the second row gives these figures
for an urban respondent, and the three next rows for respondents scoring
high on SES, Media Exposure, Empathy.

There is a clear and consistent division between the classes on all
items. The smallest difference is on the urbanism item. This indicates
that towns of 2,000 do not adequately differentiate urban from rural.

The Latent Structure Analysis ( 441 )

Had we kept the urbanism boundary at our higher 50,000 figure, the
differential in row 2 would have increased considerably. Also, had we
fixed the empathy boundary a notch lu'gher, a larger differential would
have appeared in row 5. But as the differences shown below were wide
enough on all items to test our types, the complete LSA distribution
was made on this basis— as shown in Table 3.

Table 2 — Latent Classes by Items

LXTBNT CUSS
I II

If nr

Modirrr

Traditional

1) Literals

.85

.00

2) Urban (community over 2,000)

,91

.5 6

3) High SES

.84

.13

4) High Media Exposure

.93

.28

5) High Empathy

.93

.56

When these five items were scored dichotomously, they produced 32
possible combinations. Each respondent was sorted into the item-pattern
representing his sequence of answers to the interview questions. For ex-
ample: the “pure” Modem who was literate, urban, and high on SES,
Media Exposure, Empathy was scored as item-pattern (1) + + + + +;
the "pure" Traditional who was illiterate, rural, and low on the other

three items was scored as item-pattern (32) — — — . Between

these extremes thirty variations occurred. This raised the question: at
what point do item-patterns stop being Modem and become Traditional?
This was handled empirically, by fixing the boundary between classes
where the individual respondents formed substantial groups.

Since a two-class LSA model makes obvious only the location of the
“pure” item-patterns at both extremes, how can an intermediate class
be identified? On this point the method, again, is reassuringly empirical.
By his answers to questions (the manifest data) each individual supplied
his own item-pattern. By applying the latent parameters to all item-
patterns, we learned the “recruitment cluster” for any group of item-
pattems—i.e., the probability that any individual showing a particular
item-pattern will come from one of the hypothesized latent classes
rather than the other. The rank ordering and magnitudes enable us to
decide which variations in item-patterns are likely to be of small pre-
dictive significance. We can therefore assign each individual (despite
variations) to his modal class— the class from which the majority of
respondents with item-patterns like his are more likely to come. When a
certain variant in the scale of item-patterns acquires numerous recruits,
then we infer that we may have a significant sub-class, which in due
course may become a distinct intermediate class.

Table 3 — Complete Latent Structure of Item Patterns

( 442)

Appendix C

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( 443 }

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( 444 ) Appendix C

Table 3 shows how this procedure arranged our Middle East re-
spondents. Column 2 includes all of the 32 item-patterns produced by
our five dichotomous items. Column 3 gives the probability with which
individuals exhibiting each of these item-patterns can be expected to
fall into Latent Class I; or, conversely, the relative proportion of indi-
viduals in Latent Class I that can be expected to exhibit each of the
possible item-patterns. Column 4 provides the same information for
Latent Class II. Columns 5 and 6 show, in rank order, the probable per-
centage of individuals with a given item-pattern who can be expected
to be recruited from Latent Classes I and II respectively. Column 1
identifies the “recruitment clusters" into which the item-patterns have
been arranged on the basis of their ranking in Columns 5 and 6.

The result is clearest with the two most extreme patterns. LSA pre-
dicts, in probability terms, that all respondents with pattern (1)
+ + + + + will come from Latent Class I; it predicts, further, that

virtually all of the respondents displaying pattern (32) — —

will come from Latent Class II. The probabilities for the remaining item-
patterns identify two "sets” which are associated with the respective
extremes. These can be grouped in the classes postulated by the two-
class model, for the high probability coefficients predict that virtually
every correspondingly-patterned individual will be assigned to one of
these classes. Table 3 shows that 100 per cent of the individuals exhib-
iting any of the 16 item-patterns identified as Recruitment Cluster A
can be expected to be recruited from Latent Class I; the probabilities
are very high, though not so uniform, for individuals exhibiting the 11
item-patterns identified as Recruitment Cluster C.

This leaves the five item-patterns (17 through 21) which we have
grouped as Recruitment Cluster B. Here some ambiguity does exist.
Adhering strictly to the modal-class rule, one would assign pattern (17)
— + + + + to Recruitment Cluster A, but this would introduce a
measure of heterogeneity into a group of patterns otherwise homo-
geneous in terms of their probable recruitment from Latent Class I.
Similarly with patterns (20) — + — -f + and (21) — + + — +,
whose assignment to Recruitment Cluster C would disorder its homo-
geneity. As these patterns show a drop of 10 per cent from the lower
limit (91.0) of recruitment from Latent Class II into Cluster C, there
is evidently a “natural boundary” here. A similar drop of 10 per cent
separated pattern (16) from (17) in recruitment of Latent Class I into

Cluster A. As for patterns (18) H + + and (19) h + 4 ?

which are recruited bimodally (i.e., approximately equal proportions
from both Latent Classes), it is evident that assignment to either I
or II would automatically misclassify about half of the individuals ex-
hibiting each item-pattern.

The Latent Structure Analysis ( 445 )

Consequently— and in line with our initial hypothesis about the ex-
istence of Modem, Traditional, and Transitional styles of life in the
Middle East— we introduced a third intermediate group, to which the
relatively ambiguous item-patterns of Recruitment Cluster B were as-
signed. This group comprises individuals whose style of life is neither
clearly Modem nor Traditional; it mixes principal components of both
lifestyles into a distinct and different style which we call Transitional.
While this Transitional group is not necessarily a Class in the latent-
class sense, its use as a distinctive type introduces additional control
and discrimination into the analysis of several relevant dependent vari-
ables, as was shown in the case studies.

We now have, therefore, three Recruitment Clusters— which we have
called “types” to avoid confusion with the LSA term Class. The Mod-
em Type (total 605) is represented by all individuals recruited ex-
clusively from Latent Class I. The Traditional Type (total 531) is
represented by all individuals with item-patterns recruited to the extent
of 91 per cent or more from Latent Class II. Between them is the
Transitional Type (total 221), represented by all individuals with item-
patterns recruited more evenly from both latent classes.

The controlling characteristics of these three types emerge more
clearly when their respective item-patterns are considered in detail. We
note, first, that literacy (Item 1) operates as the single most powerful
discriminator between the types. All of the Modem item-patterns are
“positive” on literacy; all those representing the Traditional Type are
“negative" on this item. This reconfirms the critical function of educa-
tion for modem and modernizing persons. But literacy is a necessary,
not sufficient, condition of a Modem style of life. Among literate re-
spondents there is still considerable variation in degree of Modernity.
Some literates are far more Modern than others; some illiterates are far
less Traditional than others.

The Transitionals, despite their illiteracy, are much closer to a Mod-
ern style of life than the equally illiterate Traditionals. As shown in
Table 3, Traditionals are “positive” (+) on two or less of the five items,
and Transitionals are “positive” on at least three items. This means
that the illiterate individual becomes a Transitional type only if he ex-
hibits one of the item-configurations shown in Table 4.

Table 4 — The Transitional Patterns

Urban

—

High Media Exposure

High Empathy

Urban

High SES

—

High Empathy

Urban

High SES

High Media Exposure

—

—

High SES

High Media Exposure

High Empathy

Urban

High SES

High Media Exposure

High Empathy

( 446 ) Appendix C

As between two illiterates, the one who is urban shows himself more
responsive to modernization than the one who is rural. Hence, urbani-
zation reappears as a distinctive component of Transitionalism— whereas
4 of the 5 Transitional patterns score + on item 2, only 4 of 11 Tradi-
tional patterns do so. Moreover, every Transitional recruited from Latent
Class I scores + on either media or empathy and the great majority
(almost 3 to 1) score + on both these items. It would appear, then,
not that these Transitionals were misclassified in Latent Class I, but
that an empathic individual who participates in the media can (even
without formal schooling) develop a pretty close approximation to a
Modern style of life.

We note, finally, that the Transitionals differentiate themselves into
three subgroups corresponding to:

High Transitionals (pattern 17)

Middle Transitionals (patterns 18-19)

Low Transitionals (patterns 20-21)

The significance of these subgroups is illustrated throughout the case
studies. What we stress here is that the Transitionals exhibit a combina-
tion of attributes ordinarily associated with a Modem style of life.
They lack education but compensate for this by scoring heavily on
other indices. It is particularly their use of empathic skills, to com-
pensate for lack of formal education, which makes Transitionals men-
in-motion and equips them to live in a modernizing world. And empathy,
we have seen, flourishes best in an urban setting, with a cash nexus
between desires and satisfactions, and with mass media to stimulate
imagination and shape imagery.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

• I am indebted to the Founda-
tions’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry
for an opportunity to work on the
problems of interviewing discussed
herein.

1. As so often happens, the poor
held extravagant but not entirely mis-
taken suspicions, for American interest
in tiro Middle East at this time did,
inter alia, reflect the not entirely dis-
interested curiosities of the Cold War.

2. Unlike the Western experience,
where women are often the pioneers
of new levels of living, the women in
the Muslim countries are being up-
rooted more slowly than the men.
Cf, the discussion of sex differences
in Hortense Powdermaker, “Social
Change Through Imagery and Values
of Teen-Age Africans in Northern
Rhodesia," American Anthropologist,
Vol. 58, 1950, pp. 783-813; among
the Bemha-spcaking young people
studied by Dr. Powdermaker, the
movies and radio had distributed
images of European styles of life far
beyond the orbits of personal contact.
And see also the discussion of class
and generational differences in the
relative emancipation of Egyptian
women in Morroe Berger, The Middle
Class in the Arab World (privately
printed by the Princeton University
Conference, , 1957), pp. 14-16.

3. I don’t know if any full-scale
study has been made of the impact
of American immigration barriers on
the origins of Fascism in the 1920’s

(through blocking Italian immigra-
tion) and on world chaos since; as
long as the capable and energetic
could “rise" to America, a global
safety-valve existed quite like that
provided by domestic social mobility.
In Mr. Lemer’s analysis there are
many who would like to live in the
United States or in Western Europe
but who, aware that they cannot get
a visa, can only turn against these
countries of desire in ambivalent re-
jection— and, sometimes, in self-rejec-
tion too. See Patricia L. Kendall, “The
Ambivalent Character of Nationalism
Among Egyptian Professionals," Pub-
lic Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 20, 1950,
pp. 277-292.

4. A recent study of Algerians by
Horace Miner indicates that urban-
ization does not reduce the suspicion
with which men regard each other
vis-h-vis their womenfolk; they can
guard their women less in the city but
are no less convinced that all other
men are intriguing against them— a
projection, it would seem, of their
own required self-image as virile
males. The appeal to hatred of the
foreigner as social cement is always
understandable among underdogs, es-
pecially when, as is so often the case,
the underdogs mistrust each other.

5. This was in 1954, prior to the
turn toward a heavier despotism of
the Menderes regime, and prior to
the current desperate inflation, which
has been given added impetus by
just such public works as the road to
Balgat and the new powerful radio

( 447 )

Notes to Pages 11 to 53

( 448 )

transmitter in Istanbul.

6. Professor Lerner comments that
a kind of literacy is required to read
the labels on tin cans— one reason
why it is difficult for a modernizing
society, even with the aid of the
movies, to skip print entirely.

7. See her book, New Lives for
Old (1956).

Melville Herskovits and other an-
thropologists have forcefully argued
against the term "preliterate" (pre-
ferring ‘‘nonliterate’') as connoting
an ethnocentric assumption of his-
torical stages in which the preliterates
will someday become, like us, liter-
ate. I believe that, whether we like
it or not, they will, though the ques-
tion remains what language or lan-
guages they will employ for drama-
tizing their past and their aspirations
to themselves and communicating in
private and in public, within an area
and throughout the globe. Depending
on accidents of history and geog-
raphy, they may write in one tongue
and listen to broadcasts in another.
Cf., e.g., David Apter, The Gold
Coast in Transition (Princeton: Prince-
ton University, 1955).

8. Morris’ discussion, and my own,
are not of course meant to blur the
many variants both of Christianity and
of Islam, nor to overlook the many
similarities of origin and creed.

9. I am indebted to Carter Zelez-
nik’s observations on his experience
in Ethiopia for a better understand-
ing of this.

CHAPTER ONE

THE GROCER AND THE CHIEF:
A PARABLE

1. Under the Ottoman Empire, a
traditional Turkish phrase for refer-
ring to the glory of the Sultan was
“master of the whole world.” The
shepherd, like his elders, apparently

falls back on the old imagery in a mo-
ment of crisis.

2, Silence does not obviate desire
In Turkish villages it is customary
for die head of household to bury
his hoard of metal coins in a secret
garden spot; when he dies there is a
frenzied treasure hunt for the cache.
Tabu on talk, as Freud suggested, is
a way of inhibiting the passage from
desires to deeds. Traditional men, like
the wise monkeys, find it safer to see
no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil
This particular custom has the prac-
tical merit of restricting plans for a
treasure hunt while papa is still alive.

CHAPTER TWO

MODERNIZING STYLES OF LIFE:
A THEORY

1. G, E. von Grunebaum (ed.),
Unity and Variety in Muslim Civiliza-
tion (1955), p. 3.

2. Ibid., p. 12.

3. See autobiographical literature of
human migration, especially W. I.
Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish
Peasant in Europe and America, v.
5 (1927).

4. Robert Park, Human Communi-
ties (1952).

5. S. Ratner, American Taxation, Its
History As A Social Force in Democ-
racy (1942).

6. This formulation approaches the
typology on American society devel-
oped by David Riesman in The
Lonely Crowd (1950). Cf. my article
"Comfort and Fun: Morality in a
Nice Society," The American Scholar
(Spring 1958).

7. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted
(1952).

8. W. H. Auden, '‘Petition.'’

9. J. W. Beach, The Twentieth
Century Novel (1932).

10. P. F. Lazarsfeld and F. N.
Stanton, Radio Research, 1942-43
(1944).

Notes to Pages 54 to 107 ( 449 )

11. Elihu Katz and P. F. Lazars-
feJd, Personal Influence (1955).

12. A. Bergson (ed.), Soviet Eco-
nomic Growth ( 19d3 ) .

13. Industrialization was measured
by proportion of gainfully employed
males in non-agricultural occupations.

H. H. Colden, "Literacy and Social
Change in Underdeveloped Coun-
tries , 1 "Rural Society XX (1955), pp.
1-7. See also: UN Statistical Office,
National and Per Capita Income in
70 Countries (1949).

M. W. \V. Rostow, The Process of
Economic Growth (1952), pp. 102-
6; Colin Clark, Conditions of Eco-
nomic Progress (1940), pp. 8-7.

15. C. L. Becker, Progress and
Power (1938); H. A. Innis, Empire
and Communications (1950), p. 11.

16. For an earlier report, see Ler-
ner: "A Scale Pattern of Opinion
Correlates,” Sociometry, 16 (August
1953), pp. 266-71.

17. A Lazarsfeldian latent structure
analysis of our data confirmed the
hypothesis beyond expectation. This
analysis, which involves complicated
technical procedures, is being pre-
pared for separate publication. A
condensed version is presented in the
Appendix.

IS. D. Lemer and D. Riesman, "Self
and Society," Explorations (June
1955).

19. W. E. Hocking, Foreword (p.
vi) to The Arab World by N. Izzed-
din (1953).

CHAPTER run EE

THE PASSING OF
TRADITIONAL SOCIETY:

A SURVEY

1. C. Y. Glock, "The Comparative
Study of Communications and Opinion
Formation," Public Opinion Quarterly,
16 (1952-53), pp. 512-523,

2. C. Y. Glock, personal letter.

3. Major BASR reports based on
the preliminary analysis of each coun-
try are:

D. Lemer, G. K. Schueller and M.
Stycos, "Mass Communication
Audiences in Turkey"

J. M. Stycos, "Communication and
Public Opinion in Jordan”

W. N. McPhee and R. B. Meyer-
sohn, "The Radio Audience of
Lebanon”

W. N. McPhee and R. B. Meyer-
ohn, “Syrian Attitudes Towards
America and Russia”

B. B. Ringer, “Partisanship and
Communication Behavior in Iran”
B. B. Ringer and D. L. Sills, “The
Political Extremes in Iran"

P. L. Kendall and B. B. Ringer,
“Climates of Opinion in Egypt”
P. L. Kendall and Elihu Katz, "Com-
munication Behavior and Political
Attitudes in Four Arab Coun-
tries”

4. The following published articles
were based on data in the BASR re-
ports:

D. Lemer, “A Scale Pattern of
Opinion Correlates,” Sociometry,
16 (August 1953)

D. Lemer, "The Grocer and the
Chief," Harper's Magazine (Sep-
tember 1955)

D. Lemer and D. Riesman, "Self
and Society,” Explorations (June
1955)

P. L. Kendall, “The Ambivalent
Character of Nationalism Among
Egyptian Professionals,” Public
Opinion Quarterly, 20 (1956),
pp. 277-289

B. B. Ringer and D. L. Sills, “Politi-
cal Extremists in Iran," Public
Opinion Quarterly, 16 (1952-53),
pp. 689-701

5, These studies can be identified
by number, as BASR reports 24, 74,
75, 79, 94, 106, 108, 116, 117, 118,
119, 121, 122, 123, 128, 135, 147,
148, 149, 153, 158, 233, 234, 403, 412,
415, 417. See BASR Twentieth Anni-
versary Report.

Notes to Pages 111 to 120

(450)

CHAPTER FOUR

TURKEY: FROM THE PAST

1. M. W. Thornburg, Turkey: An
Economic Appraisal (1949), p. vii.

2. The Turkish Letters of Oghier
Ghiselin de Busbecq (1927), p. 135.

3. A. E. YaJman, “The Press,” in
E, G. Mears (ed,), Modem Turkey
(1924).

4. Yalman, The Development of
Modem Turkey as Measured by Its
Press (1914). Also S. VV. Baron, The
Jewish Community (1942), p. 198.

5. Halil Inalcik (conversation).

0. Irfan Orga, Portrait of a Turkish
Family (1950), p. 62.

7. Lucy Garnett, The Women of
Turkey and Their Folk Lore (1891),
v. II, p. 474.

8. Garnett, Home Life in Turkey
(1909), p. 278.

9. Selma Ekrem, Unveiled (1931),
p. 183.

10. Garnett, Home Life in Turkey,

p. 181.

11. “On the day of the Last Judg-
ment, when Mahomet summons the
faithful to heaven from the purga-
tory where they are being punished
for their sins, in order that they may
partake of eternal bliss, the only path
which they can tread will be a huge
white-hot gridiron, over which they
must pass with bare feet. . . . Then,
wonderful to relate, all the paper
which they have preserved from being
trampled underfoot in the manner we
have described will suddenly make its
appearance and adhere to the soles of
their feet and serve them well by
preventing them from receiving any
hurt from the hot iron. So great is
the merit to be acquired for saving
paper from ill treatment.” de Busbecq,
op. cit., pp. 27-28.

12. Accounts vary slightly on the
exact date and circumstances. Ubicini
gives 1727, with the return of Saad
from his father’s Embassy in France,
Letters on Turkey (1856), p. 236.
Yalman gives 1728, dating from a
fetva of the Sheikh el-Islam, Develop-

ment of Modern Turkey, p. 20. D. W
Webster dates the first press and paper
factory from 1728 and the first pub-
lished book from 1729, but attributes
them directly to the influence of
Nev§ehirli Damad Pasha who returned
from Europe to serve as Grand Vezir
for twelve years. The Turkey of Ata-
tiirk (1939).

13. Ubicini, op. cit., p. 237.

14. Yalman, Development of Mod-
em Turkey, p. 20.

15. Ubicini, op. cit., p. 235 (foot-
note).

16. S. W. Baron, op. cit., v. I, p.
348.

17. Yalman, op. cit., p. 24.

18. Sir Edward S. Creasy, Turkey
(1906), p. 377. Note Ubicini’s state-
ment that the professional military
class of Janissaries opposed these inno-
vations as violently as the professional
religious class of * Ulema opposed
printing, op. cit., p. 7.

19. Halide Edib, Conflict of East
and West in Turkey (1935), p. 52.

20. Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliph’s
Last Heritage (1915).

21. Edib, op. cit., p. 105. The cor-
responding figure of 20 per cent lit-
eracy among a 14 million population
in 1918 is doubtful: the Young Turks
did not accomplish nearly so much in
one decade.

22. Full English text in Webster,
op. cit. (1939), Appendix D.

23. Republique Turque .... An-
nuaire Statistique (1952), p. 79.

24. Small Statistical Abstract, 1947-
1950 (Ankara, 1951), No. 330, p. 61.

25. Annuaire Statistique (1952), p.
57.

26. Ibid., p. 79.

27. Small Statistical Abstract, No.
330, p. 68 (Adapted).

28. Small Statistical Abstract (An-
kara, 1948), No. 291, p. 93.

29. Annuaire Statistique (1952), p.

102 .

30. Ibid., p. 102.

31. R. D. Robinson, Institute of
Current World Affairs, Letter No. 43
(22 November 1949).

(451)

Notes to Pages 121 to 169

32. Webster,- op. cit., p • 205.

33. Ibid., p. 314.

31. Eleanor Bisbee, The New Turks

(1051), P. 85. '

35. Webster, op. cit., p- 144-
30, Cf.: Nuri Giintcnkiii, Th6

Autobiography of a Turkish Girl
( 1949).

37. Cf.: Mahmut Makal, A Village
in Anatolia ( 1954 ) .

33. Annuaire Stalistique (1952), p.

95.

39. Bisbee, op. cit., p. 89.

40. United Nations, Review of Eco-
nomic Conditions in the Middle East
(1953), p. 80.

41. Annuaire Stalistique (1952), p.
157.

42. Ibid., p. 98,

43. UNESCO, Progress of Literacy
in Various Countries (Paris 1953), p.
140.

44. Annuaire Statistique (1952), p.

102 .

45. Ibid., p. 194.

46. Ibid., p. 191.

47. Ibid., p. 192.

48. Ibid., p. 305.

49. Ibid., p. 528.

50. Turkish Information Office (New
York), News from Turkey, v. VII,
No. 10.

51. Le Monde (Paris), 7 December
1954.

52. The New York Times, 20 Au-
gust 1954.

53. H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen,
Islamic Society and the West (1950),
v. I, pt. 1 , p. 244.

54. J. A. Morrison, Alisar: A Unit
of Land Occupance, Ph.D. Thesis,
Univ. of Chicago (1939).

55. Muzafer Sherif, An Outline of
Social Psychology (1948), pp. 374-
oo5,

58. J. G. Frazer, Psyche’s Task,
influence of Superstition on the
Lrnvth of Institutions (1909), p. 82.

(1917)^' ^ Dwig ^ t * Stamboul Nights
58. Bisbee, op. cit., pp. 129, 162-67.

CHAPTER FIVE

TURKEY: TOWARD THE FUTURE

1. Paul Stirling, The Social Struc-
ture of Turkish Peasant Communities,
Ph.D. Thesis, Oxford (1951), p. 91.

2. The line phrase “sense of various-
ness and possibility” is used by Lionel
Trilling to describe the “open” mod-
em personality in The Liberal Imagi-
nation (1950).

3. See David Riesman (ed.), Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology (Sept. 1956),
special interviewing issue.

4. See P. F. Lazarsfeld, “The Ob-
ligations of the 1950 Pollster to the
1984 Historian,” Public Opinion Quar-
terly (Winter 1950-51).

5. W. Durant and H. Cantril, How
Nations See Each Other (1953), es-
pecially Table 5, pp. 46-47.

6. On the distribution of values in
modem society the works of H. D.
Lasswell are indispensable. See espe-
cially: Power and Personality (1948),
Power and Society (1950).

7. D. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd
(1950).

8. On modem “propaganditis,” see
E. Kris and N. Leites, “Trends in 20th
Century Propaganda," in D. Lemer
(ed.), Propaganda in War and Crisis
(1951).

9. C. I. Hovland et al.. Communica-
tion and Persuasion (1953), pp. 105-

10. Marcel Clerget, La Turquie,
Passe et Present (1947), pp. 197-200. '

11. L. V., Thomas and-R. N. Frye,
The U.S. and Turkey and Iran ( 1951 ),
p’. 109.

CHAPTER SIX

LEBANON: TWO WORLDS
IN SMALL COMPASS

L The Lebanese population in-
cludes 252 urbanites ( cities over 50,-
000). Daily newspaper circulation is
81 per 1000: 36 radios per 1000: an-

( 452 ) Notes to Pages 170 to 174

nual film attendances 5 per capita.
UNESCO, World Communications
(1951). Among school-age children
733 were attending elementary school
in 1942-1945, as compared with 423
average in other Arab countries. R. D.
Matthews and M. Akrawi, Education
in the Arab Countries of the Near East
(1949), p. 544.

Two estimates of literacy: 60-65 per
cent by J. Donato, “Lebanon and Its
Labor Legislation,” International La-
bor Review, LXV, 1. (January 1952)
p. 71; 70 per cent by A. Tannous,
“The Village in the National Life of
Lebanon,” Middle East Journal, Vol.
Ill, No. 2 (April 1949), p. 162.

2. P. K. Hitti, History of the Arabs
(1953), pp. 735-36.

3. Hitti, History of Syria ( 1951 ), p.
695.

4. G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam
(1955), p. 224.

5. Hitti, History of Syria, p. 676.

6. Matthews and Akrawi, op. cit., p.
503.

7. G. Antonius, The Arab Awaken-
ing (1938); A. Hourani, Syria and
Lebanon (1947); G. Haddad, Fifty
Years of Modern Syria and Lebanon
(1950).

8. Matthews and Akrawi, op. cit.,
pp. 422, 424.

9. E. Atiyah, An Arab Tells His
Story (1946).

10. H. J. Liebesny, “Religious Law
and Westernization in the Moslem
Near East,” American Journal of Com-
parative Law (Autumn 1953), p. 498.

11. C. Issawi, “Middle Eastern
Entrepreneurs,” S. N, Fisher (ed. ),
Social Forces in the Middle East
(1955), pp. 119-21.

12. An extreme example: In the
village of Bar Elias, 5,285 acres were
divided into 32,643 plots. W. B.
Fisher, The Middle East (1950), p.
182.

13. Land is utilized intensively—
about Us acres available per head of
farming population. D. Warriner,
Land and Poverty in the Middle East,
London (1948), p. 82. Annual popu-

lation increase has been estimated at
2.2 per cent. (Tannous, op. cit., p.
153.) According to some specialists
the land can support only 300,000
farming persons-half the present pop-
ulation; cf. C. Issawi and C. Dabezies,
“Population Movements and Popula-
tion Pressure in Jordan, Lebanon, and
Syria,” The Milbank Memorial Fund
Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 4 (October
1951), pp. 389, 395-96.

14. Issawi, op. cit., p. 120. More
conservative estimates in Donato, op.
cit., p. 65, and Haddad, op. cit.
(800,000 and 700,000 respectively).

15. One estimate locates 86 per
cent of 1,12,000 overseas Lebanese
in No. and So. America. G. Menassa,
Plan de reconstruction de 1‘economie
Libanaise et de reforme de L’6tat
(1948), p. 384.

16. Issawi, op. cit., pp. 120-21. Cf.
R. Widmer, “Population,” S. B. Hima-
deh. Economic Organization of Syria
(1936), pp. 16-17.

17. Issawi and Dabezies, op. cit.,
p. 395; Europa Publications, The Mid-
dle East, p. 209.

18. Postwar estimate: 77 passenger
cars per 10,000 population in Leba-
non, by far the highest rate in the
Middle East. U.N., Review of Eco-
nomic Conditions in the Middle East,
1949-1950, p. 66.

19. In al-Munsif, a Greek Ortho-
dox village, only 55 per cent hved at
home all year; 36 per cent regularly
lived away and returned only occa-
sionally; the remainder commuted on
a daily or weekly basis. J. Gulick,
“Conservatism and Change in a Leba-
nese Village,” Middle East Journal,
Vol. VIII, No. 3 (Summer 1954). In
Bishmizzeen, about 14 per cent lived
in Beirut or Tripoli nine months and
summered in the village. A. Tannous,
“Emigration, A Force of Social Change
in an Arab Village,” Rural Sociology,
Vol. VII, No. 1 (March 1942). J.
Gulick, Social Structure and Culture
Change in a Lebanese Village (1955)
p. 1 36.

20. Warriner, op. cit., p. 90. Tan-

Notes to Pages 175 to 207

nous, "Emigration," loc. cit., pp. 70-

71.

21. UNESCO, Report of the Corn-
elia ion on Technical Needs, Press
Film, Radio (1949), p. 225; A. HMel-
son, ‘The BBC Arabic Broadcasts,"
Royal Central Asian Journal, Vol.
XXVI, Part II (April 1939), pp. 261-
61.

22. In al-Munsif, "traditional dances
as the dabki are looked upon at best
with sentimental attachment by most
of the middle-aged people and with
unfeigned derision by many, though
not all, younger people ... it is the
samba, rumba, and tango which please
the young people most." Gulick, So-
da/ Structure .... pp. 100-101.

23. P. F. Lazarsfeld and H. Field,
The People Look at Radio (1946),
p. 43.

24. Tannous, Trends of Social and
Cultural Change in Bishmizzeen, An
Arab Village of North Lebanon,
Thesis, Cornell University (1940), p.
225.

25. A traditional villager said:
"Most people here don't want to make
a lot of money. All they really want is
to make enough so they will not be
hungry and without clothes.” Gulick,
Social Structure . . . , p. 139. The
educated youth of al-Munsif, how-
ever, scorned manual labor and pre-
ferred urban amenities.

26. Matthews and Akrawi, op. cit.,
p. 551.

27. Tannous, Trends of Social and
Cultural Change . . . , p. 208. Similar
results were obtained by Gulick in
al-Munsif.

28. D. Potter, "The Bazaar," in
S. N. Fisher, Social Forces . . . , p.
103.

29. UNESCO, Report of the Com-
mission on Technical Needs . , . , p.
176.

30. Ibid., p. 120.

31. A set cost $84 in 19-19. Ibid.,
p. 226. An unskilled worker earned
between $1.40 and $1.80 daily. Re-
view of Economic Conditions . . . ,
1949-1950, p. 53.

( 453)

32. Musa al-‘Alami of Jordan con-
cluded, after Arab defeat in Palestine,
that "The woman must be equal to
the man so that she may share in the
formation of ... a new Arab society."
"The Lesson of Palestine,” Middle
East Journal, Vol. Ill, No. 4, p. 399.
Lebanese reform party of Kernel Jum-
blat also advocates female emancipa-
tion.

33, Hourani, op. cit., pp. 92-93.

3- 1. H. Granqvist, Birth and Child-
hood Among the Arabs (1947), p,
155.

35. J. Van Ess, Meet the Arab
(1943), p. 161.

36. C. S. Coon, Caravan (1951),

p. 168.

37. Wm. Douglas, Strange Lands
and Friendly Peoples (1951).

38. Gulick, Social Structure and
Culture Change . . , , p. 61. Tan-
nous, Trends of Social and Cultural
Change, p. 232.

39. Matthews and Akrawi, op. cit.,
p. 422.

40. Granqvist, op. cit., pp. 153-54.
See, for the historic span, E. \V. Lane,
Manners and Customs of the Modem
Egyptians (1923).

41. H. Herzog, "On Borrowed Ex-
perience," Studies in Philosophy and
Social Science (1944), p. 71.

42. PI. Kohn, Western Civilization
in the Near East (1936), p. 269.

43. Proportions of the sects in 1947
were estimated as: Maronites (29 per
cent), Sunnis (21 per cent), Shi'ites
(19 per cent), Greek Orthodox (10
per cent), Druzes (7 per cent), Greek
Catholics (6 per cent), Armenian Or-
thodox (5 per cent). Hourani, op. cit.,
p. 386.

4- 1, Matthews and Akrawi, op. cit.,
p. 410.

45. Hourani, op. cit., p. 64.

46. Estimate of 28,000 organized
among 150,000 potential trade union-
ists in 1952. G. E. K., “Some Aspects
of Lebanese Trade Unionism," The
World Today, Vol. IX, No. 9 (Sep-
tember 1953), p. 409. Estimate 14,000
in T. B. Stouffer, “Labor Unions in

Notes to Pages 207 to 218

( 454 )

the Arab States,” Middle East Journal c„ •

1 <Wi "‘ er 1952 >- PP- ^

tr ciation Conversion len f e .' A«o-

Vol, VI, No,

85

5;^“^ - n~

had served with one n,- ™ uers >
Parliaments. i . _°^, e P revi ’°us

. , > * ““uuuuuus or uemoc-

racy m the Middle East,” International

R?S r° l l™ 1 ’ N °- !• P- 40. P.
Kondot, Les Institutions Politiques du
Liban ( 1947), p.126.

£ E - K -> OP- eft., pp. 410-11.

49. Rondot, op. cit., p. 95n.

50. Hourani, op. cit., p. 62. See
also pp. 184-85.

51. “Under the list system, ‘the fic-
tion of representation is reduced in
numerous cases, to the predominance
ot brutal force and the influence of
bribes Menassa, op. cit., p. 387.
See also C. G. Hess and H. L. Bod-
man, Jr., “Confessionalism and Feu-
dahty in Lebanese Politics,” Middle
East Journal, Vol. VII (Winter 1954)

p. 16. '»

52. J. L., “Peaceful Change in Leb-
»>, ^
U9sb)i > 'p R ‘l96. a ”’ TkeLond « Cnmi

54. Issawi, “Foundations of De-

mocracy in the Middle East” dd
39-40. Cf. Britt, “Lebanon’s Popular
Revolution Middle East Journal,
Vol. VII, No. 1 (Winter 1953)- T L
op. cit., pp. 163, 168. ’ ’’

55. Hess and Bodman, op. cit.'

J- L., op. cit., p. 172.

• ^olte, "Lebanese Elec-

tions. Institute of Current World
Affairs Newsletter RHN 48, Beirut
(13 July 1953).

57. W. Z. Laqueur, Communism
and Nationalism in the Middle East
(1956), p. 162. Estimates C. P. mem-
bership at 8-10,000.

58. Ibid. Occupational breakdown
of Chamber after elections listed 21
landowners, 17 lawyers, 2 doctors, 2
journalists, 2 merchants, and one en-
gineer. Haydar, The Lebanese State
(in Arabic), Beirut (1953), pp. 45-
47. Cited in George Grassmuck, “Pub-
lic Administration: Problems of Teach-
ing and Research in the Middle East,"

- T vu v

,“ chm °’wr mm

59 7 UN E g ““. 1953) 'P-5»5.
y. ujn.. Economic Develnnmon*-

60. J. Mandelbaum, The Indus,
tnalization of Backward Areas ( 1955 )
p. xvi. v '>

fs PP - 6M °'

uovimiZ™ T,m ” 08

CHAPTER SEVEN

EGYPT: THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

«Jv? a ?T7 H °F“ gworth ’ The Arabs
and The West (1952), p. 257.

2. Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt’s

iberation. The Philosophy of the

Revolution (1955), pp. 39-40. '

5 963 05 4 Q 7CenSUS: ^088 839 people;
5,963 059 acres. Charles Issawi,

„ Jw 'i Economic and Social Anal
yw (1947), p p . 44-45. C. V. Kiser,

F wS hicPosition of Egypt” in
StuA-' Demographic

todies of Selected Areas of Rapid

G A Wt t ( 1944 )> PP- 117-18.

..j ^gnar Nurkse, Problems of Cap-

SLSTffiS).**,. **•*>***

Cent®' Matt ?s°n, “Rural Social

7 f ln Egypt," Middle East Jour-

Dr P- ^3. See also

ur. Ahmed Hussein Pasha (former
Minister of Social Affairs), paper me
pared for Third Agricultural Confer- '

en « e Xf 9“*?. 0t ] March 26 > 1949.

b ‘ AT D' Cooke, Nasser’s High As
wan Dam-Panacea or Politics (1936)

7. Kiser, loc. cit, d inq r . /'

Iiq “ e d’Egypte, Minisfore des Finances
et de 1 Economic, Departement de la
Statistique et du Recensement, An-

Notes to Pages

r.uc !te Statlstique ( 19o3 ) , pp. 22, 24.
U.N'., Monthly Bulletin of Statistics
(April 195-1), p. XX. .

8 Royal Institute of International
Affairs, The Middle East (1950), p.
142. Also: U.N., Department of Eco-
nomic Affairs, Research Memorandum
No. 11, Middle East: Population
(March 1951), p. 10. Europa Publi-
cations, The Middle East: 1953
(1953), 3rd ed., p. 82. Issawi, op. cit.,

P* *18. _

9. Issawi, op. cit., pp. 51, 152.
Egyptian Government, Ministry of
Finance and Economy, Statistical
Pocket Year Book 1952 (1953), pp.
22-23. U.N., Review of Economic
Conditions in the Middle East, Sup-
plement to World Economic Report
(1051), pp. 30, 44, 53.

10. Egyptian Government . . . ,
Statistical Pocket Year Book (1953),
pp. 98-105.

11. Hans Kohn, Western Civiliza-
tion in the Near East (1936), p. 289.

12. Issawi, op. cit., pp. 54-55.

13. Nurkse, op. cit., p. 9.

14. H. Habib-Ayrout, The Fella-
heen (1912), pp. 21, 110.

15. See H. A. R. Gibb, Modem
Trends in Islam (1945).

16. G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam
(1955), chap. XI. See also W. C.
Smith, “The Intellectuals” in S. N.
Fisher (ed.). Social Forces in the
Middle East (1955).

17. R. I. I. A., The Middle East,
2nd ed. (1954), p. 250.

18. Issawi, op. cit., p. 261n. An-
ntiaire Statlstique (Annual). Official
statistics are cited only in the absence
of independent estimates and with the
caution that even by Middle East
standards Egyptian statistics are ca-
pricious.

19. Hollingworth, op. cit., p. 229.

20. Morroc Berger, Bureaucracy
and Society in Modem Egypt: A
Study of the Higher Civil Service
(1957).

21. Atmuntrc Statlstique (1952), p.
296.

22. R. Matthews and M. Akrawi,

218 to 252 ( 455 )

Education in the Arab Countries of
the Near East (1949), p. 84.

23. Annuaire Statlstique (1952), p.
284.

24. Issawi, op. cit., pp. 61-62.

25. Matthews and Akrawi, op. cit.,
p. 84.

26. E. A. Speiser, The U. S. and
The Near East (1947), p. 144.

27. Nasser, op. cit., pp. 67-68. Fur-
ther page references to this book are
given after each quotation.

28. D. Warriner, Land Reform and
Development in the Middle East
(1957), p. 48.

29. Mohammed Naguib, Egypt’s
Destiny (1955), pp. 215-216. Fur-
ther page references to this book are
given after each quotation.

30. Text quoted from Egyptian Mail
No. 10993-268 (February 27, 1954),
pp. 1, 4.

31. The classic short essay and
long bibliography is Robert Michel’s
article “Intellectuals" in the Encyclo-
pedia of the Social Sciences. On Egypt
see Smith, op. cit.

32. Majid Khadduri, “The Army
Officer,” in Fisher (ed.), op. cit., p.
178. Also his “Role of the Military in
Middle East Politics,” American Po-
litical Science Review, XLVII, 2
(June 1953), pp. 511-524.

33. UNESCO, World Communica-
tions (1951), p. 142. A subsequent
UNESCO report on Progress of Lit-
eracy in Various Countries (1953),
p. 205, cited the 1937 census figure
of 85.2% illiteracy in the population
over ten years old. The differential is
understandable since literacy is pro-
portionately highest among the 7-12
year olds, the current school popula-
tion. Within the next decade, in fact,
many of these will have forgotten
their rudimentary 3 R’s through dis-
use. Comparisons with independent
estimates suggest that great care is
needed in dealing with official Egyp-
tian figures on literacy and education,
since these are presented to show the
best possible picture. Even its bright-
est aspect, however, is dim.

Notes to Pages 252 to 272

( 456)

34. Issawi, op. cit., pp. 182-3.

35. World Communications, p. 37.

36. Europa Publications, The Mid-
dle East (1953), pp. 102, 107.

37. World Communications, pp.
38, 176, 196.

38. Statistique Annuaire (1953), p.
632.

39. Film Centre, The Use of Mobile
Cinema and Radio Vans (UNESCO,
1949), p. 25.

40. World Communications, p. 61.

41. Ibid., p. 62.

42. Osgood Carruthers, “Voice of
Arabs Stirs Mideast,” New York Times
(January 15, 1956).

43. Edmond Taylor, The Real Case
Against Nasser (1956), p. 26.

44. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

45. Quoted in W. Z. Laqueur,
Nationalism and Communism in the
Middle East (1956).

46. Personal communication from
an officer of the Egyptian Information
Department (dated March 26, 1957).

47. G. E. von Grunebaum, op. cit.,
p. 229.

48. Taylor, op. cit., p. 34.

49. Atlantic Monthly, October 1956
(italics mine).

CHAPTER EIGHT

SYRIA: THE LURES
OF EXTREMISM

1. All figures and quotations in
this section, unless otherwise noted,
are from these sources: The Economic
Development of Syria, Report of a
Mission Organized by the Interna-
tional Bank for Reconstruction and
Development at the Request of the
Government of Syria ( 1955 ) , pp.
10-11, 18-26, 133-34, 369-74, 400,
453. U.N. Review of Economic Con-
ditions in the Middle East, 1951-1952
(1953), pp, 42, 64, 66. See also A.
Farra, LTndustrialisation en Syrie
(1950). The official labor force esti-
mate is 70,000 but the U.N. estimate

of 50,000 “excluded smaller business
establishments, areas untouched by
organized labour," apprentices and
helpers, some 15,000 construction
workers, and the craftsmen.

2. Estimated to be over §250 by
C. Issawi, “Economic and Social
Foundations of Democracy in the
Middle East,” International Affairs,
XXXII (January 1, 1956), p. 40,

3. D. Warriner, Land and Poverty
in the Middle East (1948), p. 88. N.
Sayem-Addahr, “Agrarian Structure
and Economic Development in Syria,”
Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univer-
sity (1952), pp. 132-33.

4. Issawi, op. cit., pp. 31-33.

5. The media data are taken from:
UNESCO, Reports on the Facilities
of Mass Communication IV (1950),
pp. 542-43.

6. Ibid., p. 219.

7. U.N., Preliminary Report on the
World Social Situation (1952), p. 62.

8. A. H. Hourani, Syria and Leba-
non, pp. 199-206; R.I.I.A., The Middle
East ( 1955), pp. 471-72; G. Antonius,
The Arab Awakening (1938), pp.
381-82.

9. A. N. Poliak, Feudalism in
Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Leba-
non (1939).

10. Warriner, op. cit., pp. 93-94.
Also A. Khuri, “Land Tenure,” in
S. B. Himadeh, Economic Organiza-
tion of Syria (1936), p. 66.

11. Ibid., p. 91. “Conditions of
Work in Syria and the Lebanon Under
French Mandate,” ILO, XXXIX, 4
(April 1939), p. 520. Republique
Frangaise: Ministere des Affaires
Etrang^res, Rapport d la SocietS des
Nations sur la Situation de la Syrie
et dti Liban ( 1938 ) .

12. R.I.I.A., op. cit., p. 468.

13. They numbered 360,000 in
1930, and today officially only 150,-
000. R. Widmer, “Population," in
S. B. Himadeh, op. cit., p. 12.

14. V. Vacca, “Notizie Biograficbe
Su Uomini Politici Ministri e Depu-
tati Siriani,” Oricnte Modcrno, XVII
(October 10, 1937), pp. 471-95.

Notes to Pages 273 to 300

]5. M. Perbnann (Personal Letter).

16. R.I.I.A., op. cit., p. 474.

17. H. H. Williams, Foreign Study
{or Syrians, Occasional Paper No. 4
(January 1953), Institute of Inter-
national Education.

18. Antonius, op. at., p. 374.

19. R. D. Matthews and M. Akrawi,
Education in the Arab Countries of
The Near East (1949), p. 352. In
1951-52: in government schools,
237,775; in national elementary
schools (tire former private schools),
52,270; in foreign elementary schools,
only 7,1-10. Statistical Abstract of
Syria, 1951 and 1952, Damascus, p.
52.

20. P. K. Hitti, History of Syria,
including Lebanon and Palestine
(1951), p. 472.

21. R.I.I.A., op. cit., p. 482.

22. M, Khadduri, “The Role of the
Military in Middle East Politics,” The
American Political Science Review,
XLV1I (June 2, 1953), p. 517.

23. Statistical Abstract of Syria,
1950, p. -19; Williams, op. at., pp. 32,
50; The Economic Development of
Syria, p. 150.

24. A. Hourani, Minorities in the
Arab World (1947), p. 82.

25. G. M. Haddad, Fifty Years of
Modem Syria and Lebanon (1950),
pp. 183, 197-98.

26. T. C. Young, “The Social Sup-
port of Current Iranian Policy," Mid-
dle East Journal, VI, 2 (Spring 1952),
p. 130.

27. The Economic Development of
Syria, p. 196.

28. It. Levy, Sociology of Islam
(1930-33).

29. Hitti, op. cit., pp. 628-29.

30. D. Lcrner, The Nazi Elite
(1931), pp. 87-90.

31. For a summary of Mrs. Vato-
lina’s views see "Communism: Pros-
pects in the Middle East: A Soviet
View," Jewish Observer and Middle
East Review, IV, 50, pp. 11-12. For
the U. S. estimate, see The Strategy
ami Tactics of World Communism,
Report of Subcommittee No. 5 Na-

(457)

tional and International Movements,
Supplement IIIB, Communism in the
Near East, U. S. Congress, House
Committee on Foreign Affairs (1949),
pp. 12-13.

32. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, p.
91.

33. H. D. Lasswell, D. Lemer, and
C. E. RothwelJ, The Comparative
Study of Elites (1952), p. 11.

34. International Press Institute,
News From the Middle East, Geneva
(1953).

35. D. Lemer, “The Strategy of
Truth,” in Sykewar (1949).

36. Khadduri, op. cit., p. 518.

37. J. Kimche, Seven Fallen Pil-
lars (1950), pp. 296, 299-300.

38. P. M. G., “President Shishaldi
and the Shaping of Syrian Policy,"
The World Today, IX (December 12,
1953), pp. 521-22; “Democracy Must
Wait," Time (February 8, 1954),
LVHI, 6, p. 33.

39. Second Statement on Achieve-
ments of Syria’s Government of the
New Regime During the Last Three
Months, March-June 1952. Address
by H. E. General Fawzi Selo, Chief
of State, Prime Minister, to the Syrian
People, Issued by the Directorate
General of Information, Damascus,
n.d.

40. R. Alan, “Palace Politics in the
Damascus Oasis,” Commentary, XV,
2 (February 1953), p. 155.

41. The Economic Development of
Syria, p. 55.

42. Second Statement on Achieve-
ments .... pp. 7-8, 12, 19.

43. Khadduri, op. cit., p. 523.

44. Chronology, Middle East Jour-
nal, VIII, 2 (Spring 1954), p. 185.

45. P. M. G., op. cit., pp. 522-24.

46. Chronologies, The Middle East
Journal, IV, V, VI, VII.

•17. “Soviet is Pushing its Cause in
Syria," The New York Times (March
19, 1956).

48. Mrs. L. N. Vatolina believes
that chances for the spread of Com-
munism are best in Syria and Leba-
non; but in the latter "close collabora-

( 458 ) Notes to Pages 301 to 309

tion with one section is bound to
antagonize other communities." (See
note 31)

49. W. Z. Laqueur, Communism
and Nationalism in the Middle East
(1956), p. 161.

50. Khalid Bakdash, “For the Suc-
cessful Struggle for Peace, National
Independence, and Democracy We
Must Resolutely Turn Toward the
Workers and Peasants.” Report to
plenary session of the central com-
mand of the Communist Party in
Syria and Lebanon held January 1951.
Translated by Harold Glidden, Mid-
dle East Journal, VII, 2 (Winter
1953), pp. 206-16.

CHAPTER NINE

JORDAN: ONE STATE WITH
TWO PEOPLES

1. R. Patai (ed.). The Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan, Human Relations
Area Files (1956), p. 45.

2. P. K. Hitti, “Historical Setting,"
Ibid., p. 35.

3. G. Antonius, The Arab Awak-
ening: The Story of the Arab National
Movement (1938), p. 357.

4. F. I. Qubain, “Literature" and
T. Succar, “Music” in Patai, op. cit.

5. I. Chizik, “The Political Parties
in Transjordama,” Royal Central Asian
Journal, XXII, Part I, 1935, pp. 96-
99; A. Konikoff, Transjordan: An Eco-
nomic Survey, 2nd Edition (1946), p.
24; Colonel F. G. Peake, "Transjor-
dan," Royal Central Asian Journal,
XXVI, Part III (1939), pp. 384, 391.

6 . Konikoff, op. cit., p. 18.

7. Patai, “Culture Groups,” in
Patai, op. cit., p. 66 ; E. T. Mogannam,
“Developments in the Legal System
of Jordan,” Middle East Journal, VI,
2 (Spring 1952), pp. 194-206.

8 . W. Z. Laqueur, Communism and
Nationalism in the Middle East
(1956), pp. 124-25.

9. Royal Institute of International
Affairs, The Middle East: A Political

and Economic Survey ( 1954), p . 3 ^

10. R. Matthews and M. Akrawi,
Education in the Arab Countries of
the Near East ( 1949), p. 544; R.I.I.A.,
op. cit., p. 560; Konikoff, op. cit., n
18. V

11. R. Patai and F. Qubain, “The
Town," in Patai, op. cit, p. 268.

12 . Report of the Director of the
UNRWAPRNE, GAOR: Sixth Ses-
sion, Supplement No. 16 (A/1905)
(1951), p. 2.

13. K. Davis, “Population Analy-
sis," and C. Issawi, “Agricultural Po-
tential,” in Patai, op. cit., pp. 42, 572.

14. J. Baster: “The prospect of the
Jordanian economy absorbing during
the next ten years the present unem-
ployed refugees plus the natural popu-
lation increase of the refugees and
their hosts . . . [is] remote, if the
persons absorbed are required to be
self-supporting and independent of
further continuous aid from abroad.”
“The Economic Problems of Jordan,"
International Affairs, XXXI (January
1, 1955), p. 35.

15. Report of the Director of the
UNRWAPRNE, op. cit., p. 1.

16. Issawi, “Labor Relations and
Organization,” in Patai, op. cit., p. 429.

17. U.N., Department of Economic
Affairs, Review of Economic Condi-
tions in the Middle East, 1951-1952
(1953), p, 112.

18. Patai, op. cit., pp. 421-23 and
p. 45; R.I.I.A., p. 150, estimates 60%
urbanization.

19. Europa Publications, The Mid-
dle East: 1953 ( 1953), p. 189; Patai,
op. cit., p. 274.

20. School population also varies
erratically. In 1951 about 115,000
students (already a threefold increase)
enrolled in 451 State schools, 210
private schools (catering mostly to
Christians) and 54 UNRWA schools
for refugees. Two years later, there
were 170,000 students in all types of
schools. But few teachers had pro-
fessional training, only 6% holding col-
lege diplomas, the majority being
secondary school graduates. Over

Notes to Pages 309 to 361 ( 459 )

three-fourths of elementary school
pupils were in the first four grades,
indicating a very high rate of attri-
tion. Patai, op. cit., pp. 286-87.

21. All media figures in this section
arc taken from UNESCO, Report of
the Commission on Technical Needs
(1950), pp. 208, 356-57, 531 and
UNESCO, World Communications
(1956), p. 160. See also J. C. Hure-
witz and W. Sands, “Propaganda,”
in Fatal, op. cit., p. 548.

22. U. S. Information Agency,
Ccographlcal Distribution of Radio
Sets and Characteristics of Radio Own-
ers in Countries of the World (Sep-
tember 195-1), p. 30.

23. Patai, op. cit., p. 382.

24. Larpieur, op. cit., pp. 124-25.

25. T. McFadden, Daily Journalism
in the Arab States (1953), p. 43.

26. International Press Institute,
News From the Middle East (1954),
p. 2-1

27. E. Wright, “Abdullah’s Jordan:
1947-1951,” Middle East Journal, V.
4 (Autumn 1951), p. 454.

28. Peake, op. cit., p. 391.

29. Wright, op. cit., pp. 449, 457-
58.

30. The New York Times (May 7,
1951), p. 12.

31. Ilurewitz and Sands, “Political
Dynamics," in Patai, op., cit., p. 524.

32. The New York Times (July 28,
1956).

33. Glubb Pasha, The New York
Times (March 16, 1956).

34. Laqueur, op. cit., pp. 126, 132.

35. R.I.I.A., op. cit, p. 350.

36. J. B. Glubb, The Story of the
Arab Legion (1948), p. 195; Eliahu
Epstein, “The Nomad Problem in
Transjordan,” Palestine and Middle
East Economic Magazine (February
2, 1937), p. S7 f.; KonikofF, op. cit,
pp. 18, 47-48.

37. G. S. Coon, Caravan: The Story
of the Middle East (1951), p. 201.

38. On the “two-step flow” see E.
Katz ansi P. F. Lazatsfeld, Personal
Influence ( 1955), chap. II.

39. A. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon
(1946), p. 64; Glubb, “The Beduins
of Northern Iraq,” Royal Central
Asian Journal, XXII, Part I (1935),
pp. 18-19.

40. “Beduin of the Negeb: Sons
and Fathers of the Desert," Palestine
and Middle East Economic Magazine,
II (November 1937), p. 526.

41. Wright, op. cit., p. 458.

42. Islamic Review, XL (January 1,
1952), p. 3.

43. C. C. Adams, Islam and Mod-
ernism in Egypt (1933), p. 110.

CHAPTER TEN

IRAN: IN A BIPOLAR WORLD

1. H. L. Hoskins, The Middle East
(1954), p. 166.

2. G. Lenczowski, Russia and the
West in Iran, 1918-48 (1949).

3. Hoskins, op. cit., p. 13.

4. Ibid., p. 190.

5. H. F. Grady, “How The Iranian
Crisis Began,” The New Leader
(April 27, 1953), pp. 3-4.

6. Hoskins, op. cit., pp. 173-74.

7. Ibid., p. 171.

8. A. K. S. Lambton, Landlord and
Peasant in Persia (1953), p. 393.

9. Ibid., p. 395.

10. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism
(1954), p. 134. See pp. 206-22 for
fuller analysis of the relationsln'p be-
tween imperialism and dupery.

11. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive
Mind (1953). .'Also review by D. Lcr-
ner in American Sociological Review,
XIX (August 1951), pp. 488-89,

12. R. N. Frye in (with L. V.
Thomas), The United States and Tur-
key and Iran (1951), p. 209.

13. See: J. Morier, The Adventures
of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1949).

14. Hoskins, op. cit., p. 175.

15. Frye, op. cit., pp. 183, 185.

16. Hoskins, op. cit., p. 165.

17. As no census has ever been

( 460 )

Notes to Pages 361 to 411

taken, the following illustrates the
range of authoritative estimates:
14-16,000,000— Statesman’s Yearbook,
(1955), p. 1289.

15,000,000— R. N. Frye, op. cit., p. 7.
16,549,837— Overseas Economic Con-
sultants, Iran, H.M.S.O. (1948), p.
49.

17.750.000— Overseas Consultants, Inc.,
Report on the Seven Year Develop-
ment Plan . . . ( 1949 ) II, p. 5.

18.772.000— Europa Publications, Ltd.,
The Middle East: 1953, p. 249.

19,139,563— estimate by Iranian Min-
istry of Interior in 1951, cited in
Statesman’s Yearbook (1955), p.
1289.

19.798.000— U.N., Population and Vi-
tal Statistics Reports (January
1954) (official government esti-
mate).

18. M. A. Djamalzadeh, “An Out-
line of the Social and Economic Struc-
ture of Iran," International Labor Re-
view, LXIII (January 1951), p. 26.

19. On these demographic esti-
mates, compare sources cited in Note
17. A high figure of 2% net natural
increase is given by L. P. Elwell-
Sutton (personal letter).

20. U.N. Research Memorandum
No. 11, p. 10.

21. Overseas Consultants, Inc., op.
cit., II, p. 82 and Exhibit B-17.

22. For small variations in the sam-
ple bases of Tables 16-20, see the
BASR report by Ringer and Sills.

23. For clinical analysis of this per-
sonality type see H. D. Lasswell,
Psychopathology and Politics ( 1930 ) .
Also Power and Personality (1948)
and The Analysis of Political Behavior
(1948).

24. The New York Times (Decem-
ber 27, 1953).

25. M. Clarke, “New Iran Premier
Foe of Foreigners,” The New York
Times (May 7, 1951), p. 11.

26. Ibid. (May 7, 1951), p. n,
Europa Publications, op. cit., p. 405.

27. See R. N. Frye, op. cit.

28. C. Daniel, “Mossedegh Career
Unique in Iran," The New York Times
(March 1, 1953), IV, p. 5.

29. M. Panter-Downes, “Letter
from Teheran," The New Yorker
(April 21, 1956), p. 131.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

1. D. Lemer and D. Riesman, “Self
and Society,” Explorations (June
1955).

2. Cf. H. D. Lasswell, D. Lerner,
C. E. Rothwell, The Comparative
Study of Elites (1952).

3. S. N. Fisher (ed.). Social Forces
in the Middle East (1955).

4. Ibid., p. 152.

5. H. A. R. Gibb, Modem Trends in
Islam (1947), p. 48.

6. Fisher, op. cit., p. 200.

7. G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam
(1955), p. 229.

8. Fisher, op. cit., pp. 200-01.

9. M. Berger, Bureaucracy and So-
ciety in Modem Egypt (1957), p.
185.

10. J. W. Williamson, In A Persian
Oilfield (1927), chaps. XI, XVII,
XVIII.

11. See, especially, the work of E.
E. Hagen and P. N. Rosenstein-
Rodan.

Index

■Abduh, Muhammad, 348

■Abdullah, King, lx, 305, 310-12

Activism. 163, 165, 225, 259

Advertising. 147

Africa, 4, 248, 254-56

Aga Khan. 405

Ahmadahad, 390

a 1-Ahram. 232, 245

al-'Auas, 232

’Alawli, 272

ol-DUa'a, 310, 344

Aleppo, 267-68. 274-75, 277; College, 274. 281

Aluandrctta, 270

Alexandria, 218. 227

al-Goumhouria, 254

Alienation, and extremism. 369-74

Alixar. Turkey, 131

at-Mlsrl, 232

al-Mithaq. 344

al-Nasr, 235

al-Tahrlr, 257

ttl-Urdun, 343

Ambivalence: o( Elllea: In Egypt. 223-26. 239-
40; In Iordan. 343: In Syria, 283-84; of
Transitional!. 160-62

America(ns). (US.). 10-12. 45. 56. 78-79, 144,
152. 158, 171. 173, 181. 200-04. 207 . 210.
224. 227 , 236. 273-74. 283 . 291. 294. 309,
314. 317. 320. 324. 326-27. 329, 334-35.
342, 353-54. 356. 378-83. 390, 392-93 , 396
American School lor Girls, 198
American University of Beirut (A.U.B.), 11,
170. 193, 207. 278-81. 301. 311
American University at Cairo (A.U.C.), lx
Amin. Qasim. 196

’Amman, 304-05. 307-12. 315. 327, 343-44
Anglo-lranian Oil Company (AlOC), 355-56,
360. 362, 375-76. 3S0. 387, 391
Ankara. 10, 117, 126. 162. 400
A politicals, 288. 365, 367-68
Sa'id. 170

Arab: Caliphate. 282: identity, 403: League,
235. 310, 403; Legion, 311. 314: Libera-
tion Movement (Syria). 299; nation, 215.
402; nationalism, 216; News Agency. 249,
254, 310: Socialist Party, 276; World, 403
Arab-Musllm: identification. 333, Syndrome,
211. 213. 303, 349. 404-05, 409, unity,
404. 408

Arabic. 184. 190. 235. 253 . 255. 257, 269-70.
273-74, 332, 334, 341; literary renaissance,

171

Arabism. 264, Pan-, 3. 212, 257. 333

Arabs. 7. 13. 237. 243, 250. 263, 273. 2S0.
285-86, 292-93. 297. 300. 304-06, 309-10,
312-13. 317, 330, 343. 366. 405. 409
Aramco, 327

Aruiotle. 356

Armenians, 115. 223

Armed Forces Network (AFN). 158

Annies (Military), 403; In Egypt, 247; In
Iran, 360; in Lebanon. 205. 209; in Syria,
264, 272, 276. 279, 282-83. 296-300
Aswan Dam, 215, 217-18
AtassS, Hashim, 300

Ataturk, Mustafa Kemai. lx, 8, 105, 111-13,
127-28, 159, 197-98. 298-99, 407. 409. 412;
bchaviorlst ideology, 112; communication
revolution. 112. 120-23; education policy,
121-22: elite policy, 275; village policy,
117

Authoritarianism, 126-28, 151
Azerbaijan, 354. 387

Baghdad Pact. 255. 258, 314, 356-57, 404. See
also Middle East Defense Organization
(MEDO)

Bakdaah. Khalld. 302

Balgat. 19-42 passim, 43-44. 118-20, 147, 186,
400-01, 410
Barq al-Shamal, 269
Becker, Carl, 64

Beduin. 9, 188. 265, 272, 304-05. 314-28. 338-
39. 399. 456 note 13. Interviews-. 177-78.
317-28 passim, future chieltaln, 324
Beirut. 170. 173. 187, 191-92. 203 . 305
Belgium. 389
Berger, Morroe, 238
Berkman, Paul L . vlll. 438 note
Besikduzu. Turkey, 133
Bethlehem, 314

Belter Homes and Gardens, 335
Bipolarity, and extremism, 377-88
Bisbec, Eleanor, 134
Bishmizzeen, Lebanon, 187-88
Bilim Koy, 122

Books; in Egypt, 253; in Turkey, 122. 124-25
Brazil, 173

Britain (England, British). 171-72, 175, 203,
207, 214, 222-26, 228 , 231, 235-36. 241,
249-50, 258. 270. 292. 304-06. 309, 311-14.
317, 327, 334. 341-43, 348, 353-57, 359-60.
362. 375-77. 383, 396

BBC. 5, 13. 15S-59, 175-76. 181, 201. 234-35.

268. 316, 341. 344, 346, 377, 383. 395-96
Bureau ol Applied Social Research (BASR),
vil, 79. 81

Bureaucracy (Bureaucrats), 403: In Egypt. 220,
238, 263: in Iran. 54. in Syria, 264, 276,
278-79. 400

Cabot. John. 52

Cairo. 5. 10. 13. 67. 171, 212. 216. 218, 250,
253-55, 262, 272. 305, 309. 314, 334, 341,
357. 402. 404-05, 403
CaUkusu, 122
Carlson. Robert O., vil
Cary, Joyce, Mr. Johnson, 4
Cash (Money), 25, 410-11. 446, Sense of.
128-29. 132, 174

( *101 )

Index

( 462 )

Censorship, 134, 310, 337-38
Center for International Studies. 79-80

Change: concept of, 47-48; Permanence — De-
bate, 45-46; personal meaning of social,
46

Charisma, 263

Chief, the Balgat, 8, 19-42 passim, 133, 147,
178, 332, 410

Choice of Country, 183, 319, 328-29
Christians, 9, 169-72, 184, 198, 205-06, 227.
277, 281, 358, 404-05

Cinema (Movies): and personality change.
400; in Egypt, 232, 235-36, 253-54; in
Iran. 384-88, 393; in Jordan, 309, 316,
321, 325-26, 329-30, 337, 345-46, 349,
399-400; m Lebanon, 191, 193-94, 196, 200-
01, 203, 400; in Syria, 269, 284; in Turkey,
27-28

Clothing: chadors, 197; neckties, 40; sholvars,
40, 46, 111; women’s, 197-98
Cold War, 9, 341, 447 note 1
Colliers, 344

Columbus, Christopher, 52
Communication: and Beduin, 318-27; and so-
cial change, 171; and social groups, 315-
17; and social systems, 55-65; oral, 185-86;
oral and media systems compared, 55-58;
networks. 71; public. 412; village, 185-96;
world-revolution, 56. — in Egypt, 214-16,
240. 242-63; in Iran, 359, 366, 377-88,
392-93; in Jordan, 315-27; in Lebanon,
185-96: in Middle East, 405; in Ottoman
Empire, 113-16; m Syria, 264, 267-70,
287, 295, 298-99; in Turkey, 129-30, 409
Communism (Communists): in Egypt. 244,
257, 259, 261; in Iran, 360, 366, 374, 388,
391, 393-94. 396; in Jordan, 305, 313-14,
321; m Lebanon, 457-57 note 48; in Syria,
85, 265, 276, 289, 291, 293 , 295, 300-02,
457-58 note 48
Confessionalism, 207
Consensus, 50, 403, 410-11
Conspicuous Consumption, 158
Constitutions, 172, 207, 250. 299-300, 312
Constrictive: Personality, 141, 148-51; Self, 73,
134

Copts. 223, 227, 405
Correlations, Multiple, 58 note, 438
Cortez, Hernando, 52
Cosmopolitanism, 180
Cotton, 227-28, 259

Coups d’Etat: Arab, 247; Egyptian, 241; Iran-
ian, 360, 392; Iraqi. 247; Jordanian, 314;
Lebanese, 205, 208-9; Syrian, 247, 265,
279, 296-300

Courage Culture, 7-8, 133-34, 151-52, 374

Creasy, Sir Edward, 115

Crusades, 171, 282

Curiosity, 141-42, 412

Cyprus, 235, 268

Dairy Farming, 335

Damascus, 13, 267-68, 271-72, 274-75, 279, 282-
83, 285, 293, 299-300, 302, 305
Damietta. 218
Daniel, Clifton, 392
de Busbecq. Oghier Ghiselin, 113-15
Democracy (Democrauzation), 64, 68, 172,
208, 240, 268, 286, 438
Demakrac Party (Turkey), 31. 41
Deprivation, 368-69, Relative, 210, 327-28,

j6o

Dewey, John, 264
Dhahran, 327
Dhtmmi, 206

Dictatorship, desire for, 280-87
Douglas, William O., 198

5"“®?; ‘Z 0, ? 06 ' 209, 227, 272, 300, 405

Dwight, H. G . Menush, 134

Edib, Halide, 116

Education, 410, 438; among women, 197.0.
and population density, 66; and S
! Chr i sllan Muslim

36 3 3 67 m” „ EE , ypt i 238 - 39; » Inn,

, In’- 37 r 2, u “ Jordan ’ 305 -° 5 ' 458-59
™t e 20; in Lebanon, 171, 188-89, 197.9.

206, 452 note 1; in Ottoman Empire, lis‘
ln 8 £ 269 ‘ 70 ’ 2'3-74, 276 457

note 19; in Turkey. 121-23 n

Ego: Constriction, 228; Defense, 141; Identity
See Empathy '

Egypt, viit-x, 6, 9-10, 12, 44, 68, 83-106 pauim,
117, 173-74, 205, 211, 214-63, 267, 2™
283-84, 296-97 , 302, 304, 309-10, 314
333 , 343 , 361, 397, 399, 401-02, 406-07,
409-10; Lower, 253; Upper, 254
Egypt's Liberation, 214
The Egyptian Mail, 177
Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB), 234, 244,
253-57

Elders (Aged, Older Generation), 186, 193-96,
399; conflict with youth in Lebanon, IBS-
96, Interviews: (Jordan), 323-24; (Leba-
non), 193-96

Elections: Jordan, 311-14: Lebanon. 207-09:
Syria, 300; Turkey, 111, 126-27, 16666.
See Political Participation
Electrification, 125

Elites: Egyptian, 214-15, 219-20, 223, 225-26,
236-40, 246-47, 257-59, Iranian, 357-59,
362-63 , 365-67, 369, 371, 373 , 375. 377-78,
386-87, 391: Jordanian, 305, 307, 310,
315-17, 342-49: Lebanese (rural), 185-96:
Middle Eastern, 402-03 , 407-08, 410;

Syrian. 265, 270-75, 278-79. 296-98, 300,
Turkish, 166. — Counter-Elites, 257, 261,
270, 275. 362, 366, 369, 371, 374, 378,
386-87

Emigration, 36, 172-74
Empathy, 49-54, 60-62, 64, 69-75, 78, 85, 96-
98, 130, 134, 143-44, 156-57, 173, 18M1.
183-84, 190. 400-01, 412, 439-46, Replica-
tion of the Empathy Index, 434-36
Enterprisers, 315-17, 335-42; rural and urban,
compared. 336. 338-39, 346. Tinker tnler-
view, 336-37
Erikson, Erik H., 407
Ethiopia, 255-56

Europe (Europeans, Europeanization), 45, vst<
354, 356, 361, 389-90
Exploration, 65; Age of, 52
Extremism, Political, 402; in Iran, 3S9-ss>
392; in Jordan, 311-14; m Syria, 275-87,
288-97 passim, 302

Falaslin, 344, 349 , . .

Farmers: Egyptian, 222-40 passim, Jordanian,
315-17, 328-35, 338-39; Turkish, 151. Ml
Peasants, Fellahin
Farouk, King, ix, 90, 106, 228
Farzanagan, General, 393-96
Fath All Shah, 353

Faysal, King, 272 ...

Fellahin, 3, 217, 226-29, 240, 261, 266-6/,
295, 298, 301, 305, 317
Fertile Crescent, 305, 317, 403, 405 ,

Foreign: exposure, 139-40, 180-81; h s * eners
interviews, 176-77; magazines, 200-03
France (French), 9, 171-72, 175. 203, 2-7.

255, 270-74, 284-86, 304, 334. 356, 359, 38V
Franck, Peter, 407
Fraser, Sir James, 133
Free Officers (Egypt), 241
Freud, Sigmund, 439
Frye, Richard N„ 359

Generalization of Personal Problems, 142-43
Germany, 359

Index

( 463 )

»f H. A. : It. 262. 408

Clock, Charles Y„ vll, SO
Gbkalp, Ztys. 136
Gcrtr. Geoffrey. 39

‘the Baltlt. 19-42 passim, 62, 73-74,
ClK m. Hl“ ‘l47. I«/ x«. 327, 400-01,
. 410

Gulek, Kuitn. 165
Cut£flbers» Jolttflfies* 52o3

Hsbib-Ajrout, Father Henry, 226
Haiti. 306, 343
Hail. 406

Helk-eWfW* (Turkish People's Houses), 112.
120

Haoa. 277, 2S0, 283

Happiness, 73-74

Hefiopolii, 216-17

Hull. Philip K., 293, 304

Hocklni, W. H., 74

Home Holes. 335

Homs, 2SO-S2. 300

Hoskins. Halford L„ 359

Hourani, Albert. 169. 195. 205, 295. 400. 408

Huujrn. Kins, 314

Husaynl, al-Hai] Amin ai-, 312

I lore Lucy. 53

Ideolosy, 374-77 -

Identity, Quest for. lx-x, 402-07

Illiteracy (Illiterates), 12, 232, 338, 363. 395-96

Imamis, 405

Immisration, 52, 65, 447 note 3
Income. 26S, 411: in Egypt. 217, 219-20; in
Lebanon, 453 note 31, 456 note 2: in
Syria. 266-67: in Turkey, 119-20
India, 7. 383
Indonesia, 404

Industrialization, 410, 438, 449 note 13; and
radio set production. - 62; and urbanism,
58; in Egypt. 219, 260. In Iordan, 306;
In Syria. 265-67
Influence, Flow of, 138

Information. 55-56: among Jordanian types,
315. 320-21, 327, 329; concentration of,
138-39

Ingenuity Culture. 7-8, 134-35, 152. 374
Innls, Professor H. A.. 64
Innovator, The. 406
Inonu. Ismet. 165
Insecurity, in Iran. 357-59
Intellectuals (Intelligentsia) , 403; In Egypt,
237-40, 246-47; in Iran. 359, 362-63, 370,
373. 394; in Jordan. 314; in Middle East,

300-01* Sjnl * 26S> 282 ’ 291 ’ 297 ‘ 98,
Joltrnalional Bank Mission, 265, 267, 278
International Press Institute, 310
Interview Survey, 147-48; organization and
analysis, 7S-S2; questionnaire, SO, 104-05,
-115-33; responsiveness to. 1-2, 164-65;
sample, 81-82. 174 note

loamcuers: Egyptian, 261; Jordanian. 318;
tT.c I Lebanese, 194-95, 199-200;
in?, 1181 Tahlr S " passim; Tosun B.,

29^31 35 7 °* 73 ' 74 ’ WS * 1475 Z,Ua K "

lutroicction. Sec Empathy
tqbal, Muhammad, 406

^i 07 *«**». 174. 227.
~ 97 * 353-97, 401*02, 404, 406, 412;
In* i °5p v * ct Fisheries Co. t 356-57

306 ILm 5 * 9 ]' ? JJ -

Itbid, jJj 206, lra< li-Jordanian Federauon, 213
Imgsuon, 217

Islam, 226, 237, 239, 248, 264, 281, 347-49.
404, 406, 408-09; and women, 197-98;
Islamic identity, 400, 402; Arab, 216; Pan-
Islam. 3. 257, 405
Ismailia, 218
lsmaills, 405

Israel, 6, 9, 242. 258, 282. 292, 294, 296-97.

303-04, 309-13, 339, 405
Issawi. Charles, 220, 252, 267, 407
Istanbul (Constantinople), 130, 162. 272, 347,
408

Italy, 229

Jaffa, 306. 310-12, 343

Jerusalem, 305-06, 308-10, 314, 334, 344, 347
Jews. 115, 223, 305. 313-14, 358
Jidda. 332

Jordan, ix-x, 9-10. 44, 83-107 passim, 227,
255, 303-49, 397, 399, 401-02, 404
Journalists, 239, 263
Jumblat, Kemal, 209

Karak, 308

Karltk, Turkey, 132-33
Katz, Elihu, 81

Kendall, Patricia L*» 81, 221 note. 224
Kelman. 358

Khadduri, Majid, 247, 276, 407
Khalid, Khaiid M„ 406
Khurl, Bishara al-, 2W
Kismet, 146

Koran, 76, 111, 122, 234. 236, 259, 278, 317,
330, 332-33, 339, 348. 404, 406
KOy Kanunu (Turkish Village Law), 117
Kurds, 116, 227
Kuwait, 355

Kuwatl). Shukri al-, 297. 300

Ladies Home Journal, 201-03, 344
Lambton, A. K. S., 358
Land Ownership; Egypt. 220; Syria, 266, 298
Laqueur, Walter Z„ 454 et seq.

Lasswell, Harold P.> 296

Latent Structure Analysis, 72, 104, 438-46.

449 note 17
Latin America. 173
Lawrence, T. E„ 11
Lazarslcld, Paul F., vii, 438-39

Lebanon, viti-x, 8-10, 44, 83-106 passim, 169-
213 , 219, 222, 227, 263. 266-67, 269-70,
274, 277, 281, 308-10, 400-01, 405
Lenin, 407

Levant (Levantine), 205, 213, 408
Liberation (Tahnr) Province, Egypt, 242
Liberation Rally (Egypt), 254
Libraries: In Egypt, 253; in Turkey, 124-25
Life. 177, 341
L'lUustration, 335

Lileracy, 237-38, 438, 440-46; and Beduin at-
titudes, 320; and empathy, 64; and media
participation, 58, 62; and modernity, 57-64;
and population density, 66-67; and urban-
ism, 59-64, 66-67, 120-21, 123-24; and
voting, 16. — compared in Turkey and Egypt,
88-89; in Egypt. 252, 455 note 33; In Iran.
395-96; in Jordan. 305, 308; in Lebanon.
171, 452 note 1; to Ottoman Empire, 116.

450 note 21; to Syria, 269; in Turkey,
112, 123-24. 198

Living Standards, 210
L'Orient, 211-12
Luther, Martin, 407
Lydda, 311

McPhee, William N„ 81, 185 note, 287 note

Ma Perkins, S3

Macauley, Lord, 7, 152

Machiavelli, 7, 152

Machismo, 7-8

Index

(464 )

Makal, Mahmud, 122, 127

Male Vanity Culture, 196-97, 204, 399-400

Malikis, 404

Mamluks, 282

Manus, 11-12

Mark Twain, 43

Markham, Edwin, 131

Maronites, 170-71. See also Christians

Marsh, R. M.> 434 note

Marxism, 242. 301

Mass Communication. See Mass Media, Media
Systems, Communication
Mass Media, 177-78, 399-400, 402, 412: access
to and influence, 186, 189-96: centripetal
nature of exposure to, 64, 136-37, 176,
384; participation, 438-46: pictorial, 139:
preference and sectarianism, 206; social
correlates of exposure to, 136-37; and
growth of ambition, 4-5; and Beduin, 319-
21, 324-27, 337-38; and empathy, 53, 62;
and literacy, 58, 62; and modernity, 53-
64, 67; and social change, 45; and urban-
ism, 62, 67; and vicarious experience, 52-
54; and women, 196, 200-04; and world
public opinion, 54. — in Egypt, 231-36,
251-56; in Iran, 362-63, 381-86, 391-92.
394; in Jordan, 305, 309-11. 319-21, 324-27.
337-38, 343-46; Jordanian refugees and
non-refugees compared on Exposure In-
dex, 307-08, 310, in Lebanon, 177-78, 186,

189- 96. 212-13, 451-52 note 1; in Middle
East, 95; in Syria, 268-70, 291; in Turkey,
120, 124-26, 130

Matrix of Social Variables, 57-64, 439
Mead, Margaret, 11-12
Mecca, 249, 332, 405
Media Participation. See Mass Media
Media Systems, 55-58
Mediated Experience, 52-54
Menassa. Gabriel, 211
Mendacity, 358
Mendercs. Adnan, 407
Merton. Robert K.. vii
Meyersohn, Rolf B., 81, 185 note. 287 note
Middle Class. 263, 275-76, 291
Middle East, ix-x, 3, 6-7. 43-47, 67-68, 78-79,
83, 85-86, 196-97. 206-07, 215-16, 226,

235, 240, 252, 259. 263. 268. 278, 282,
288, 296, 303-04, 314, 340, 349, 361-62,
367. 384, 389. 396-412, 440; Defense Or-
ganization (MEDO), 255, 357, 383
Millard, William J„ vn
Miller. Joaquin. 303
Millets, 114, 171. 206-07
Minorities, 405
Missionaries. 171, 198, 226
Mobile Sensibility. 5

Mobility, 210-11, 399, 402; among Lebanese,
172-74; among Transitionals, 94-95, 162;
in Middle East, 83; occupational, 219,
336; physical (or geographic), 36, 47-48,
52-53, 65, 118, 266. 452 note 19; psychic,
51-52, 64, 69, 163 (See Empathy); social,
48-49; upward, 161-62, 202; and choice of
country, 183; and status in Lebanon, 187,

190- 93

Mobs, 5. 359

Modem Romances, 202

Modernity (Modernism), 43-75 passim, 84-85,
237-39, 349, 408, 410. and communica-
tion. 267-68; and empathy. 50-51; and
urbanism, 58-59; as a system, 46, 55. of
Palestinians, 306-08, of young Beduin,
326-28, in Jordan, 315-17; in Lebanon. 169;
problems of, 211-13; symbols of, 360
Modernization, vm-ix, 6-7, 45-46, 196. 263 ,
398-99, 401, 405, 410, 438; and happi-
ness, 73-74; indices of, in 6 Middle East-
ern countries, 86-90; its personal meaning,

76-77; moral issues of, 73-74; phases nr
60-64; scaled and audited for Middle Em
ern nations and individuals, 84-103-
chastic factor in, of Middle East, 61 m-
theory of, 77; typology of, 71; v/mw,
model of, 46-47, 56; in Iran, 3S3, 359 , 3 «.
in Syria, 266-67, 296; in Turkey, 111 - 13 ’
See Typology for analysis of Modernlzal
tion

Modems, 13-14 . 71, 75, 83-84, 91, 129-31, 134 .
36, 153-59, 165, 174-84 passim, 201-03
206-08 , 277-87 , 290 , 307-08, 342-46, 36’
364, 410, 438-42. 445-46
Morris, Charles. Paths ot Lite, 12
Morrison, J. A., 131, 133
Mossadegh, Mohammed, ix. 9, 90, 127, 258
355, 359-60, 362. 388-97, 406
Movies. See Cinema, Mass Media
Muhammad 274, 405

Music, taste in, 181, 183-84, 277-78, 317, 344-45
Muslim: Brotherhood (Brothers, Ikhwan ), 144 ,
256, 259, 261, 282, 300, 409: clergy and
print, 114-15; identity, 403; law, 390; So-
cialist Front, 276; world, 8 , 403-04
Muslims, 9, 12, 171. 184, 198, 205, 222-23,
248, 272, 277, 292, 304, 358, 403-04. 409

Nablus, 314

Naguib, Mohammed, ix, 241-45, 248-49, 258,
390, 406

Nasser, Gamal ‘Abdul, 6, 68, 127, 213-16, 221,
225-27, 229. 231, 240-51, 254-39, 262-63,
299, 302, 389-90, 397, 406-07
Nasser Syndrome, 9, 106, 225, 248-51, 286, 389
National Front (al-Jubha al-Watamyya) (Ior-
dan), 313

National Socialist Front (Lebanon), 209
National Socialists (Jordan). 313
National Images: In Iran. 374; in Jordan, 343
Nationalism, 3, 15, 47, 402; Arab, 216, 305;
Egyptian, 221-31, 239-41; Iranian, 375-77;
Syrian, 264, 274-75, 287-96 passim
Nationalist Bloc (Syria), 273, 276
Nazis, 278, 284, 355
The New York Times, 344, 392
News: and Beduin. 321-23; and Enterprisers,
335-42; and Farmers. 320-35; attitudes to-
ward, 177-82; explanation, 189-90; pref-
erence, 178-79, 233-34; recall, 145-46, 315-
16, 321-22, 339-41; sources, 137, 179, 316-
17 338

Newspapers, 399; in Egypt, 232, 253-54; in
Iran, 383-84, 393; in Jordan, 309-11, 316-
17 , 321, 325, 327, 329, 333-35, 337-39, 343-
45, 348-49, in Lebanon, 191-92, 208-09, m
Syria, 269-70, 280, 284, 297. 301; m
Turkey, 119. 127

Nile, 216-18, 227 , /MATn ,

Norih Atlantic Treaty Organization (NAlU),
355

Northern Tier, 403
Novel, the Modern, 52
Nurkse, Ragnar, 220

Occupations: in Egypt, 219-20, 238-39; as basis
of Egyptian typology, 222-40 passim, m
Syria, 265, 272-73, 456 note 1; in Turkey,
119

Oil in Iran, 35 3, 380-81, 388 . ,

Opinion, 51, 72-73, 412; and Beduin, 323, 01
foreigners, 140; leaders, 26-28. 56, la
96, 246, 332, 336, 373; public, 99, 113-14.
396-97; Range, in modermzauon typology.
70-73, 98-99, world public, 54
Other-Direction, 155-56 ...

Ottoman Empire, 113-16, 127-28, 150, * >
270-73, 275, 282, 304-05, 358, 448 note 1

Pakistan, 6, 383

( 465 )

Index

psionnc (Palestinian). 9, 242, 283. 292-93.
297. 303-06. 310. 333. 335. 343, 34^4/.

300, 2 ”'

“d. 114. 450 no* 11

r„®4ni: Soccty. 50-51. 74: development
0 f_Soclcty. 60-64: Style, 4-5, 78, 366, 371.

Participation: indices and matri* of. 57-65;
and Opinion Range. 71-73: economic 62-
63. 219, 265-70, 458 note 14. Pse«0o-
panidpation. 5. See Literacy. Mass Media,
Political Participation, Urbanism.

Patal, Raphael. 188

Peake. F. O.. 311-12

Penny Press, 62

Persian Gulf, 353-55. 396

Personal Impotcncy, 99-100

Personality Variable. 72. See Empathy

Phalange Party (Lebanon), 188

Picture Foil, 341-42

Political Participation. 57. 60. 64, 68, 85,
compared in Turkey and Esypt. 89: in
Efypt. 68: in Iran, 358, 362; in Jordan,
305, 310-14: in Lebanon, 205-13; in
Middle East. 401-02, 405-06: in Turkey,
165-66

Politicians, 187
Politicisation. 248-49, 295
Population: density and modernisation, 65-7;
caplosion. 5; ol Egypt, 214-21; of Iran,
360-61. 459-60 note 17, 460 note 19; of
Iordan, 303-04, 306: of Lebanon. 113, 452
note 13: of Syria, 267
Populist ( Sha'ab ) Party (Syria), 279
Port Said. 218

Poverty: in Egypt, 214. 216-21. 259; In Mid-
dle East. 411

Prelitcracy (Prelltcrates), 12, 15. 448 note 7
Print. 14-15, 114-15

Printing Presses. 52. 115-16. 125. 170, 450
note 12

Professionals: in Egypt, 77, 222-40. 249-50,
262; in Iran. 362-63; in Jordan, 312-14,
343-44. Qadi Interview, 77. 346-49; in
Lebanon, 181-82; In Syria. 264. 268, 276-
SI. 191, 1CW - , Syslast Tita Interview, 1&4-S6 - .
In Turkey, 153-56. See also Intellectuals,
Elite

Propaganda. 159. 262 , 297
Projection. See Empathy

Projective Questions, 24-25. 69-70, 143-44.
194-95

Public Opinion. See Opinion

Radio: receivers and industrialisation, 58, 62;
stations. 177. See also VOA. ESB, BBC.
Voice of Arabs. AFN; Moscow, 13, 377,
383: Tehran, 392, 395; in Balgat, 26-27;
In Egypt, 232-35, 253-54; in Iran, 382-83,
«2. 394-95: in Jordan. 309, 316-17, 321,
fr^'35. 337-39. 344-46, 348; In Lebanon.
174-&4, 192-95, 204; In Middle East, 67:
In Saudi Arabia, 56: In Syria, 268-69, 277,

: 6 158 S: iD Turkcy ' 1U * 12, 119 ' 20 ’ 124-
Ramailsh, 303-09

RaUonalny 43-49; and national statistics, 65

S'*' Wtat, 341-42

Redficld, Robert 12

Reference Groups, 370-71

Reformation, the, 407

Rcl t65- 205-07. 234, 277, 330-31,

ResK^e-a 3 n °“ 43! mCD ° 1 ‘ 239

< %* > (Turkey). 19, 31
Rttiurectlon (Booth) Party (Syria). 276, 295,

Revolutionary Agitator, 373-74
Revolutionary Command Council (R.C.C.),
241-42, 244-47. 258
Reza Shah, 107, 197, 390, 412
Riesman, David. 155, 197, 208
Ringer, Benjamin B., 81, 221 note, 366 note,
378 note
Riots. 314
Robert College, 11
Robinson. Richard D., 119, 121
Role-Playing, 70. See Empathy
Rote-Projection. See Empathy
Romance Magazine, 177
Rosewater Revolution, 207-09
Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA),
305

Roza al-Yusuf, 310

Russell. Bertrand, History of Western Philos-
ophy, 10

Russia (ns). (USSR, Soviets), 140, 227, 240,
285. 287-88, 291-95. 317, 320-21. 329, 334,
353-57, 359, 361, 377-88, 398, 404

Saadi, 353
Sa'dabad Pact, 357
Sadiq, Professor Issa, 395-96
Saida, 173, 327
Sakaitutan, 141
Salem, Gamal, 258-59
Salem, Salah. 244-45, 258
Sa'ud, King. 402, 406
Saudi Arabia. 56, 324, 332, 355. 402. 404
Scale Pattern of Opinion Correlates. See
Typology

Schueller. George K., 81
Sears-Roebuck Catalogue, 62
Sectarianism, 206-07
Secularization. 165. 230, 438
Selim III, Sultan. 11
Selo, Fawzi, 297
SerraJ, 'Abdul-Hamid, 106
Sexes, Relations between: in Japan, 8: in
Jordan, 330: in Lebanon. 196-204 passim;
in Middle East. 7-8
Shafaq, Dr. Dona, 93
Shafaq, Professor, 407
Shah of Iran. 359. 362. 387
Shepherd, the. BelgeA, TV, TVXS, id, 5V. TO,
74, 192

Sherif, Muzafer, 131-33

Shi'ites, 358, 370, 390, 404-05. See Muslims

Shishakli, Adib, ix, 279, 297-300, 406

Siegfried, Andre, 43

Sills, David L., 81, 366 note

Silone, Ignazio, Foniemara, 12

Smith, \V. C., 407, 409

Social: Dissociation, 369-70: Interaction, 371-74

Socioeconomic Status (SES), 367-68, 439-46

Somers, R. H , 438 note

The Spectator, 341

Speiser, E. A., 240

Spokesman, The, 406, 412

Stalin, Joseph, 407

Steinbeck, John, Sweet Thursday, 51

Stirling, Paul, 141

Student Interviews : Lebanon, 181; Syria. 263,
279-82, 300; Turkey, 153
Stycos, J. M., 81, 315 note
Stycos, Mary, 81
Style of Life, 400, 438-39
Sudan, 250

Suez, 218, 250, 258, 263
Sullivan, Harry Stack, 149
Sunnis, 358, 404. See Muslims
Swaddling, 38-39
Switzerland, 272, 389
Sykes, Sir Mark, 116

Symbols: of Class and Nation, 221-31, 294-96,
364-65, 374-77, 408; of Peoples, 151-52

Index

( 468 )

Syria, Ix-x, 2-3, 9, 44, 85-106 passim, 227, 247,
265-302, 304, 310, 343, 364, 397, 399,
401-02, 405-06, 434-36
Syrian National Socialist Party, 276

Tannous, Afif, 187 -88
Taqlyeh (Dissimulation), 358
Tatars, 282

Taylor, Edmond, 255-56, 258
Teachers, 239, 263

Tehran, 10, 356, 358-59, 361. 364, 377, 390,
393; Conference, 357
The Goldbergs, 53
Thomas, Lewis V., 165
Thornburg, Max W„ 112-13, 119
Time Magazine. 70, 144, 177, 344
Totalitarianism, 248
Traditional Society, viii, 3-4, 399
Traditionals, 11, 13, 70-75, 83-84, 129-35, 136,
139-53. 165, 174, 177-78, 182-83, 199-201,
210, 226-29, 231, 236, 270, 288, 296, 301-
02, 307-08, 325, 327, 337. 361, 438-41, 443,
445

Transitionais. 5. 13-15, 71-75, 83-84, 93-96,
100-03, 129-31, 136-37, 159-66, 184-85,

201-02. 210-11, 230-31. 236. 246, 252, 289-
90. 307-08, 328, 332, 334, 337, 340, 401-02.
409-10, 438-39, 443, 445-46
Transjordan, 303-05, 343
Trilling, Lionel, 102
Tripoli. 173, 191-92
True Story, 177

Tudeh, 355. 360, 366, 377-78, 391. 394, 396
Turkey, viil-x, 8-9, 11, 19-42. 44, 83-106 passim.
111-68, 172. 219, 222. 227, 270, 275, 334,
401, 404. 409-10, 447-48 note 5, 448 note 2
Types (Traditionals, Transitionais, Moderns),
compared within and among countries,
91-94

Typology for analysis of Modernization, 13,
71-72, 82, 129-31, 315; and refugees and
non-refugees in Jordan, 307-08; and politi-
cal typology in Syria, 289-90; and radio
audiences of Lebanon, 175; as correla-
tional matrix, 104; correlated with occu-
pations in Egypt, 222

Typology of Political Attitudes: in Iran. 364-66;
in Syria. 287-96

Ubieini, J. H. A., 115
Umayyads, 274

Underdeveloped Countries, 65-68
Unemployment: of intellectuals in Egypt, 237-
39; in Jordan, 308

Unhappiness (Dysphoria), 101-03, 144-46, 230,
368-69, 398-99

Unions. 188, 207, 233, 453 note 46
United Arab Republic, 213, 262-63, 302
United Nations, 224
UNESCO, 152, 252-54, 309
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 303, 314
Universite de St, Joseph, 170
University Graduates: in Egypt, 237; in Iran,
363; in Syria, 276

Urbanization (Urbanism), 410, 438-46: and
industrialization, 58; and literacy, 59, 61-

64, 66-67, 123-24; and media participation
67; and workers, 230; as index of mod!
entity, 57-68 passim, 116; compared m
Turkey and Egypt, 88; imbalance in Mid-
die East. 87; pre-urbanization, U8; sub-
urbanization, 118; in Egypt, 218-19; in
Iran, 361, 366-67; In Jordan, 306, 3084)9-
In Lebanon, 192-94, 451 note 1; in Middle

?23 24 67i ^ Sylia ‘ 26?i fa Turkey ’

Vacca, Virginia, 273
Vatolma, L, M„ 291
Veblen, Thorstcin, 158
Vicarious Experience. See Mediated Expert-
cnce

Village Institutes (Turkey), 117, 121-23, 198
Villager Interviews: Egypt, 252; Lebanon, 177.

186, 188-89, 192
Vogue, 344

Voice of America (VOA), 177, 200, 344, 383,
395

Voice of Arabs, 5, 13, 212, 216, 249, 255. 309,
314

Voluntary Associations, 207

von Grunebaum, Gustavo E., 257, 409

Voting. See Elections, Political Participation

Wahhabis, 402, 405
Warrmer, Doreen, 242
Wealth, Distribution of. 209-11, 268
Weber, Max. 250. 406
Webster, Donald E., Ill
West (Westerners, Westernization), 9, 11, 14,
45, 169-74, 223, 225, 235-36. 240-41, 249,
258, 268-69. 271. 274, 277-78, 282-83,

285-87, 292-93, 299, 305, 310, 312, 317,
320, 327. 332, 342, 344, 348, 353-57, 362,
377, 386, 388, 391, 400, 402, 406-08, 411
Woman and Home, 335
Women, 447 note 2 and note 4; 453 note 32;
in Lebanon, 77, 174, 177-78, 196-204; in
Middle East, 93. 399-400; in Syria, 282;
in Turkey. 124-25, 151
Workers: in Egypt, 260-61; White Collar— in
Egypt, 222-40; in Jordan. 306; in Lebanon,
182-83, 199, 210. Interviews : Lebanon,

Shi‘1 shoemaker, 194-96; Syria, carpet-
weaver, 1, 293-94; hairdresser, 15, 289.
294; Turkey, Black Sea worker, 149-50;
Izmir cobbler, 150
“World of Daytime Serial,’’ 53
Writers, 239

Xcnophilia, 181

Xenophobia, 6, 47, 257, 292, 408

Yalcin, Huseyin Cahit. 127
Yalman, Ahmed Emin, 113
Yemen. 303, 405

Young EfTcndis, 106, 270, 275-87, 297, 300, 302
Youth, 174, 186-96, 326-28, 399

Zabedi, General Fazlollah, 392-93. 395
Zable, 173, 192
Zaidism, 405

Za'ira, Husni al-, 297, 299